Cannes opens amid terror threat

With almost enough star wattage to forget the grim anti-terror measures in place, the Cannes Film Festival opens on Wednesday with Woody Allen’s nostalgic comedy Cafe Society starring Kristen Stewart.

The red carpet awaits some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, such as Julia Roberts, Jodie Foster, Sean Penn, Robert De Niro, Charlize Theron and George Clooney, as the French Riviera town transforms into the film capital of the world for 12 heady and exhausting days.

The event has heaped pressure on French authorities already on high alert six months after terror attacks left 130 dead in Paris.

But 80-year-old Allen’s opening film is a eulogy to supposedly less fearful times, a love story that flits between 1930s Hollywood and bohemian New York where gangsters, millionaires and ambitious women rubs shoulders to a trad jazz soundtrack.

Before his film premiered, the Hollywood veteran admitted that the terror threat was playing on his mind. “I’m hypochondriacal when it comes to terrorism,” Allen told Variety, “the world’s biggest worrywart.”

Hundreds of extra police officers have been deployed, however, with daily bomb sweeps of the main venue — the Palais des Festivals — and long queues at checks to get inside.

But while rain is forecast to drench the opening, authorities have vowed security will not further dampen the jamboree that lures celebrities and film industry schmoozers to Cannes.

Festival director Thierry Fremaux told AFP that despite the terror threat which prompted the French interior minister to visit the town on Monday, this would be a “normal year I dare to say”, and that it was important that Cannes “is there to defend (global) cinema”.

This year is one of the most star-studded in recent times, and Twilight megastar turned indie darling Stewart as well as Blake Lively and Steve Carell are among those appearing on the red carpet on Wednesday for the Cafe Society premiere.

Allen also narrates the movie — his 46th — which he describes as “like reading a novel on my life” with the actor and writer Jesse Eisenberg, of The Social Network fame, playing the Allen character.