Tight security, an airbrushing scandal and high movie anticipation at the 70th Cannes Film Festival

Workers set up the official poster of the 70th annual Cannes Film Festival on the Palais des Festivals facade, in Cannes, France. The poster displays a photogram of Italian actress Claudia Cardinale.

May 16, 2017 2:20 PM PT

Reporting from Cannes, France — Now that France’s presidential election is over and 39-year-old Emmanuel Macron, dubbed “Le Kid” by local media, has been inaugurated, this country can turn to what’s really important: celebrating the 70th edition of Cannes, the world’s preeminent film festival.

That’s something of an exaggeration, of course, but not as much as you might think. The French take enormous pride in Cannes, spending more than 20 million euros of taxpayer money every year to put on an event that in 2015 attracted 30,421 film professionals, including a whopping 4,038 journalists.

Mindful of the April terror attack in Paris and an especially deadly one last year in Nice, just 18 miles away, millions in additional money is being spent on safety.

Security certainly feels more intense and visible this year, especially around hotels, where plainclothes operatives scrutinize visitors with more than the usual care, and lines to get into the Palais reflect added time for searching.

To mark Cannes’ 70th anniversary, the festival has gone all out, starting Wednesday night with a screening of French favorite Arnaud Desplechin’s “Ismael’s Ghosts.”

Also planned are gala dinners, concerts, special guests (Clint Eastwood, David Lynch, Jane Campion and Alfonso Cuaron), a virtual reality short by Alejandro Inarritu, even a celebrity tournament of petanque, a much-loved local game.

Because this is the 70th, photographs from Cannes’ past have been blown up and put on the sides of buildings. Especially striking is one of Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren literally freeing caged birds to bang the drum for (what else but) “The Birds.” They knew about publicity back in the day.

And there is not one but two official posters gracing local shop windows, including a photograph of Claudia Cardinale circa 1959 that caused a minor scandal recently when it was revealed that her figure had been airbrushed. A typical Twitter response: “If even Claudia Cardinale cannot represent beauty without being retouched, we really are in trouble.”

Experiencing the billboards for forthcoming movies is one of Cannes’ perennial pleasures, with displays for the animated summer movies “The Emoji Movie” and “Animal Crackers” (tagline: “You are what you eat”) sharing space with the Michael Keaton-Taylor Kitsch “American Assassin,” which insists, “It takes one to make one. It takes one to betray one.”

One of the most unusual billboards this year was a first-ever display promoting a country, not a film. Vietnam is advertising itself as “The New Destination of Blockbusters” and promoting Ho Chi Minh City as “An ‘Attractive, Friendly and Safe’ Destination.” Good to know.

Two of the biggest billboards in town are for the two highly anticipated films distributed by Netflix: Noah Baumbach’s Adam Sandler-Ben Stiller-Dustin Hoffman “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)” and Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s “Okja.”

Because Netflix eschews theatrical distribution, and because theater owners are a powerful force here, the festival’s decision to play these two projects became controversial, so much so that an announcement was made that in the future, films without extended theatrical runs would not be selected.

With so much else going on, the actual films chosen for the festival’s numerous sections can get a bit overshadowed, but they seem to be a promising lot.

The American contingent, anchored by several major independent directors, looks to be especially strong.

Besides Baumbach and “Meyerowitz,” top names in competition include Todd Haynes and “Wonderstruck,” from the Brian Selznick novel; Sofia Coppola and “Beguiled,” from the same novel that inspired the Don Siegel/Clint Eastwood film, and Josh and Benny Safdie’s “Good Time.” Big studio films are noticeable for their absence this year — except, of course, on billboards.

Also in competition is the U.K.’s Lynn Ramsay, returning to Cannes with the Joaquin Phoenix-starring “You Were Never Really Here,” while over in the rival Directors Fortnight section, Sean Baker, who caused a splash at Sundance with his iPhone-shot “Tangerine,” debuts “The Florida Project.”

As far as foreign-language directors go, Cannes once again rounds up many of the usual suspects: Andrey Zvyagintsev (“Loveless”), Michel Hazanavicius (“Redoubtable”), Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Killing of a Sacred Deer”) and Palme d’Or winner Michael Haneke (“Happy End”).

Also notable are “The Square” from Sweden’s Ruben Ostlund, whose “Force Majeure” was a Cannes breakout in 2014, and, over at the Directors Fortnight, a new film by Claire Denis, “Un Beau Soleil Interieur,” starring Juliette Binoche and Gerard Depardieu.

With all this frantic activity as backdrop, perhaps the festival’s most unexpected sight so far was a billboard for the French perfumerie the Harmonist. “Harmony,” the sign read, “Is The Source of Beauty.” Maybe that’s true in other towns, but you’d be hard-pressed to prove it in the madhouse that is Cannes.

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