Far from losing patience with Kar Wai, Cannes invited him back last year to chair the festival jury. When they selected his My Blueberry Nights . . .

his first English-language film . . . to open this year's festival, even Kar Wai laughingly asked, "Are you worried that there will be a repeat of what happened before?"

And should they have been worried?

"Well two days ago I was in Los Angeles finishing post-production, " he says. "I got a print here yesterday and everyone was surprised."

When its stars . . . Jude Law and the soul singer Norah Jones, daughter of the Indian sitar-player Ravi Shankar, making her acting debut . . .

walked up the red stairway at the Palais des Festivals for its premiere on Wednesday night, even they hadn't seen it.

Cannes could have played safe and opened its 60th anniversary festival with Oceans 13, which is showing out of competition next Thursday, or some other Hollywood blockbuster. After all that's what it did last year, with the execrable The Da Vinci Code.

Throughout the years Cannes has been adroit at juggling art with commerce.

It manipulates glitz and spectacle to provide a platform for all that is new and daring. With My Blueberry Nights, Cannes reaffirms this belief in pure cinema that is its raison d'etre.

"I believe in something we can all share beyond language, " says Kar Wai. Yet, paradoxically, My Blueberry Nights has almost as much dialogue . . . this time in English . . . as all his other movies put together. Some might call it a homage to the American road movie. With a music score by Ry Cooder, it evokes Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas. Norah Jones finds in Jude Law a sympathetic shoulder to cry on when she calls at his New York diner looking for a lover who has jilted her, but then heads off across America to escape her loss.

"The film is not about a journey, it's about distance, " says Kar Wai. "That's why I shot it widescreen. It's not until Norah gets to the other side of the country that she realises that perhaps Jude is the man she wants to be near."

As in In The Mood For Love and Chungking Express, Kar Wai revels in the chance moments that change people's lives and the fragmentary nature of urban existence, what the Irish poet Micheal O'Siadhail calls "the fragile city".

The entire movie pivots on a single prolonged kiss, charged with an eroticism seldom achieved in western cinema.

Maybe a kiss is just a kiss but it was taboo for so long in China that it's not something Kar Wai takes for granted. "The act is the same in all cultures but what is before and what is after is very different in China and America . . . and so is how it is perceived, " he says.

Norah Jones, none of whose music is used in the soundtrack . . . "I didn't want it to distract from her as an actor, " says Kar Wai . . . is a revelation, seldom off the screen for a moment and wonderfully natural in her portrait of a vulnerable woman who tells the truth and can't believe others don't.

Greatest surprise Perhaps the greatest surprise about My Blueberry Nights is that it is produced by Harvey Weinstein, whose company also has two other movies in the festival's official selection, Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof and Michael Moore's Sicko, which promises to do for the American health industry what his 2004 Palme d'Or winning Fahrenheit 9/11 did for Bush's Iraq War. Weinstein has arrived here with an army of lawyers preparing to do battle with the US Treasury, which is threatening to jail Moore for contravening US economic sanctions against Cuba by bringing some ailing Ground Zero workers to Havana for hospital treatment.

Cannes championed Moore long before Fahrenheit 9/11 made him the bete noir of the American right. Roger and Me, his 1989 footin-the-door assault on corporate America, was premiered here, as was Bowling for Columbine.

But Cannes, after all, was born out of politics. While championing pure cinema it has always acknowledged that it isn't just art for art's sake, cut off from the world out of which it comes.

When the Venice Festival, set up in the 1930s as a creature of Mussolini's fascism, refused to give its top award to Jean Renoir's pacifist La Grande Illusion, the French decided to set up their own rival event "to serve cinema". It was to open on 1 September 1939 but was cancelled the next day with the outbreak of the second world war. When it finally got going in 1946 . . . since it missed a year in 1949 for economic reasons, 2007 is counted as its 60th birthday . . . it was soon caught up in Cold War politics, with the US objecting to Communist bloc bias and the Communist bloc to US bias, while in the 1950s and 1960s France itself, on De Gaulle's orders, censored any movies about the uprising in Algeria. Cannes' early reputation for daring was earned through politically subversive movies but by Brigitte Bardot cavorting in an early bikini and starlet Simone Silva whipping off her top and embracing a surprised Robert Mitchum.

It took the 1968 student riots in Paris and a sit-in led by Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard which forced the festival to shutdown in sympathy . . . the last picture screened was Peter Lennon's documentary The Rocky Road To Dublin . . . to shake Cannes out of its conservatism. Its response was to insist on selecting its own programme rather than relying on nominations from various countries. It also approved the establishment of a parallel Director's Fortnight programme for films not included in the official selection.

By the early 1970s Cannes had became a platform for a new wave of ruthlessly soul-searching American movies. It also championed movie-makers banned in their own countries.

That was its initial attraction to me, when I started going there in 1972. It was a way of ridiculing Irish censorship by highlighting all the movies by great directors we couldn't see at home. The Grand Prix was shared by Francesco Rosi's daringly subversive The Mattei Affair and Elio Petri's The Working Class Go To Heaven, while Miklos Jancso won the best director award for Red Psalm.

"We must try to knock down the wall of human incomprehension, " Petri told me. "I find that methods of oppression are becoming more and more idiotic, " said Jancso.

Gregory Peck was there as producer of The Trial of the Cantonsville Nine, a verbatim reconstruction of the 1968 trial of Fathers Daniel and Philip Berrigan. "I think the Vietnam War is a horror, " said Peck. "We ought to get out and admit we were wrong."

In Winter Soldiers, ex-GIs one by one came before the cameras to describe what they did and saw in Vietnam. Virtually without emotion they talked about throwing prisoners from helicopters, spraying poison gas on children and raping women. "I am nauseated, " said jury member Joseph Losey, himself a victim of the Hollywood blacklist. None of this particularly impressed Alfred Hitchcock, however. When I asked him if he thought cinema should be ideologically committed, he replied, "Sam Goldwyn said messages are for Western Union."

Back then Cannes was a much smaller affair. It was staged at an elegant palace on the Croisette, near the Carlton hotel. You could have a beer in a bar with Jack Nicholson or argue with Pier Paolo Pasolini without being hassled by paparazzi. Bergman, Fellini and Antonioni mixed freely with journalists.

The parties didn't have armies of aggressive bouncers, although I remember when a girl took some flowers from a table vase at a party given in the Majestic by Tony Curtis, at which the champagne flowed, a waiter took them back. "Mr Curtis is paying for the champagne but the flowers belong to the hotel and we need them for another party, " he explained.

Now Cannes has come full circle. The Iraq War has animated American filmmakers much as Vietnam did back then. The difference is that now politicallycharged movies, partly thanks to the exposure provided by Cannes, have become mainstream.

American filmmakers have filled the gap in the discourse of democracy left by the failure of politicians to challenge the excesses of the Bush administration.

This is reflected in the fact that 14 out of the 49 films officially selected are American.

"The reality is that this year American cinema seems to be great, " says Thierry Fremaux. So great things are expected of the Coen Brothers (No Country For Old Me), Quentin Tarantino (Death Proof), Gus Van Sant (Paranoid Park), Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), James Gray (We Own the Night) and David Fincher (Zodiac).

Although Wong Kar Wai, Catherine Breillat (An Old Mistress), Emir Kusturica (Promise Me This), Carlos Reyadas (Silent Night), Alexander Sokurov (Alexandra), Ulrich Seidl (Import/Export), Christophe Honore (The Love Songs), Bela Tarr (The Man From London) and Faith Akin (The Edge of Heaven), in particular, will provide stiff competition for the awards which will be announced next Sunday after the closing movie, Denis Arcand's The Age of Darkness "Movies are delightfully simple, " Hitchcock told me in 1972. "What you do is take a piece of time, add colours and patterns and you have a movie."