CANNES, France -- Eight-thirty on a beautiful morning.

The sky is Mediterranean blue -- azure the locals call it -- the water is dark, the wind light, the sun, though still low over the mountains, diamond pure in its incandescence.

It promises to be another day in paradise.

And 800 people are crowded into a theater to watch a REALLY DEPRESSING movie!

Ha! You think that's something? You know nothing! I will show you something! Two days later, 8:30 on a Sunday morning, and again they line up in paradise to get into another movie. Yes, so what, you say. I'll tell you what: it's an ADAM SANDLER movie!

This of course could be no place on Earth but France, during the Cannes Film Festival, the 55th edition of which is unreeling on the edge of Homer's wine dark sea, reported by more than 4,000 journalists, many (such as this one) with wine dark tongues.

It's something to see, really. The French have a term, amour fou, "mad love." That is the kind of love being practiced here. It is passionate, angry, all embracing, even a little terrifying. These people care about movies. They practice what might be called full-contact moviegoing. It is not a sport, not really, or a hobby, not at all. It is an all-consuming craziness that finds even the most bourgeois of the French slick, beautiful, smooth, cosmopolitan, and in control, standing in the street trying to cadge a ticket -- any ticket -- to an Adam Sandler movie!

So as not to start a war between the French and the Americans, let me state quickly that it is undoubtedly Adam Sandler's best movie, directed by the eccentric American genius Paul Thomas Anderson ("Magnolia") and it's an extremely bizarre but lovable oddity called "Punch-Drunk Love." It's about a young man so twisted with self-doubt he can only express himself through crying jags and self-directed rages while at the same time, engineering a plot to acquire frequent-flier miles by buying Healthy Choice pudding for the coupons. His enemies in these endeavors are his seven monster sisters who want nothing from him except total obedience.

And the depressing movie was also probably worth getting up early to see. It was Mike Leigh's corrosive "All or Nothing," a bitter study of what it's like to be lower class and fat in England, and the answer is: not much fun.

These French people, as I say, so refined, so smooth, but put a mob of them in the dark and show them a movie and they respond from the heart, sometimes brutally. The poor French director Olivier Assayas, for example, can't have awakened too happy Sunday morning, for at the conclusion of the screening of his film "Demonlover" Saturday night in the Claude Debussy theater in Cannes' Palais des Festivals, the few remaining audience members booed lustily. You never hear that in America where we sheep juststumble numbly to our cars. Here, the people hoo-hawed and whistled and stamped their feet. And these were clearly people who stayed purposefully to boo since most of the others had left after the scene where the British actress Connie Nielsen, in bed with the fashionably bald Charles Berling, blows his brains out with a .45. They wanted to boo. They savored booing to their marrow.

But the movies -- those are only two of the best and one of the worst -- are really only part of the story of this film festival, which is more than anything a tribal celebration of all the clans of celluloid. It's like an ancient gathering under afull moon at Stonehenge when, like chanting Druids, everybody comes out. You see everyone from the biggest star to the most jaded critic to the most annoying executive to the most desperate fan walk cheek by jowl in hot sweaty crowds. It is the one time and place where film culture -- high and low, artistic and commercial, adoring and contemptuous -- is expressed in public rather than in elite watering holes and anonymous bunker-like offices in swank Southern California neighborhoods.

And so it is that you can wander through the lobby of the Majestic Hotel on the famous Croisette and hear fragments of phone conversations the likes of which you'd never hear anywhere else. That is one of the only pluses of the ubiquity of the cell phone, that it makes moments of savage intimacy available to eavesdroppers.

"Lauren read your script one night," one would-be mogul was saying to one poor schmo on the other end of the line, "and she didn't like it."

Ah! Lauren Whoever-the-Hell-She-Is strikes again. Some poorguy's hopes and dreams just got smashed toatoms and dust. Lauren doesn't mess around! Lauren says no, boyo.

So his project will never happen and you have to wonder why because what you see here isn't just the highest of cinema art but the lowest of cinema commerce. This is a film festival in which "Punch-Drunk Love" may be shown in the big "Theater of Lights" for crowds of swells in dinner jackets and gowns and yet at the same time you can wander into what is called the Market, a smaller almost hidden hall that you have to look aggressively to find, where the more basic currency is cash and the work in question might bear the title -- the only time this title will be mentioned in this newspaper I assure you -- "I, Zombie: A Chronicle of Pain."

In fact, one might look at the structure of the Palais itself as a metaphor for the structure of film culture. It's a kind of modernist cathedral to the cinema, on a grand scale, as if designed by George Lucas for some kind of intergalactic film fest, not beautiful but immense, multileveled, complex, full of treasures such as -- this was a find! -- a bar where they give away Jamison's Irish whiskey. True, you have to have a little ID necklace signifying that you are a member of the tribe. But if you have that, I suppose it's possible to park there and just drink Jamison's all day long and ot helt wif the, ha, um, oh yeah, to hell with the @$#%C%:**@!& movies.

But that was Thursday. This is Sunday and we are back to being responsible. Back to the structure as metaphor: the Palais with its press rooms and interview rooms and screening rooms, its grand steps before the fabled Theater of Lights, where the stars ascend, is the hub of the event.

That is probably the key Cannes experience as the world sees it: men and women of exquisite beauty, talent or wit swaying, bathed in light, as they climb those immense red-carpeted stairs to appropriate music -- there's an orchestra on site of course. You see why it's worth fighting so hard to get there, as no ego trip in movies can be quitesuch an intoxicant, not even the Oscars.

That's what you see on the tube; the physical experience is less intriguing, involving aspects of ordeal. It's like all the parades you were forced to see as a kid squashed into one hideous experience and the swarming of it all reduces you to childhood, helpless and pitiful again. You can't see a thing, except for the gleaming roofs of the Mercedeses and the sashaying hair of the beautiful as they ascend toward cinema heaven while around you the French crush in for a glimpse of star flesh.

If you flee from that you'll wind down an obscure alley until you come at last to what nobody talks much about. The Market Hall, an exhibition space, where much of the low-end down-and-dirty wheeling and dealing is done and where a film like "I, Zombie" will live or die in the Mindinao or Sardinian exhibition circuits. In its way, that's as much of world movie business as was Woody Allen up there in his dinner jacket opening night, hearing the roar of the crowd for a happy French ending to his not very good "Hollywood Ending."

But again, that is only a small part of what is really going on. On any given day, movies are being shown all over the place, not only in the Palais and the hall, but in all the commercial theaters in Cannes. Sunday, the day of rest: between 9 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. 192 separate films will be shown, all of them for sale. The run-of-the-mill product as the posters suggest revolves around a semi-bearded white guy with some kind of fancy gun. There's even a movie called "American Gun."

During all this, the city itself is transformed into one of those very special places. Think of Paris in the '20s or New York in the '50s. But this special place seems as if the cast of extras from "Blade Runner" has been turned loose on the set of "The Count of Monte Cristo." The hordes of green-haired teens with fishhooks in their eyebrows wander cobbled twisty streets talking of movies. It's very much a country of youth transforming even the old to the fleet of foot and the quick of step. Everybody's going someplace, has an appointment, a truly engaging cell phone conversation, a bottle of wine to drink, a pitch to make, a contract to sign, a dream to dream. The cafes are full. Enough wine has been drunk to darken that sea even more, and enough cigarettes have been smoked to kill the population of a small town in Wisconsin, but nobody cares and nobody complains. They are having so much fun at the movies in the city of the immediate experience.