CANNES — Sometimes the world seems like a small Mediterranean village, and the guy standing in the fountain in the town square is usually Kevin Drew. And so it was with a feeling of inevitability that I found the Broken Social Scene major-domo at Sunday night’s bash for John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus at Martinez Beach.

In town to pitch himself as a movie director (it’s not like he’s got enough to do already) before the BSS continues a European tour, Drew was there as the plus-one for another displaced Canadian, Leslie Feist. Though officially big in France (she contributes the final song to Paris Je T’Aime, a highly enjoyable multi-director tribute to the city of lights), Feist was not swarmed by the film-biz types in attendance — they’re either Californians, philistines or both.

Before our hometown heroes were consumed by the nightly street party that takes place at the nearby Le Petit Majestic, they took in Shortbus star Sook-Yin Lee’s live musical performance at the end of the pier, part of a rambunctious set by the film’s creator and cast that included a site-appropriate rendition of Plastic Bertrand’s "Ça Plane pour moi." Two things were very striking about Lee’s contributions to the gig. The first was that she sang songs that were staples of her sets with The Chevrons back in Torontopia’s Paleozoic era, temporarily making the French Riviera seem more like The Rivoli circa 1997. Secondly, the self-same CBC Radio host could be simultaneously seen on a nearby TV getting exceptionally friendly with a black dildo. That’s something none of us got to see at The Rivoli.

Earlier in the day at a press luncheon, Lee said she wasn’t overly worried about what the people who know her back home might be thinking about her appearance in Shortbus (****), a frank, funny dramedy in which many cast members perform unsimulated sex. "You could spend a lot of time worrying about lots of things," she says. "I just think, ’I’m not going to.’ Any action has its repercussion and I will try my best — what will happen will happen. Worrying has gotten me in trouble in the past so my new thing is to just deal with it."

For his part, Shortbus’ writer and director Mitchell (who met Lee while shooting Hedwig and the Angry Inch) believes that nothing but nice things can come out of the experience. "This film has good karma," he says. "It comes from good intentions. We’re trying in our own tiny way to remind people there are good things left in New York and America, people still trying to discover the truth in a certain way rather than hold everything at the borders."

Mitchell’s movie — which plays like Woody Allen’s Manhattan with money shots — was one of the few to provide positive vibrations in the first leg of the 59th annual festival. If it hadn’t been selected as part of the midnight-movie section, it might have been a contender for an award. (The jury might have even added a category for "Best Rim-Job Singalong Scene.") As it stands, the competition slate is halfway done and few titles have stoked grand passions. There was warm feeling for Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver (****), the Spanish director’s long-anticipated return to movies about women after the dude-centric Talk to Her and Bad Education. Penelope Cruz is funny and magnetic in Almodóvar’s mix of melodrama, fantasy and comedy, though the film itself treads some familiar territory. You could call it Some More About My Mother.

The first of Richard Linklater’s two films at Cannes (A Scanner Darkly makes its world premiere on May 25), a new adaptation of Eric Schlosser’s appetite-spoiling bestseller Fast Food Nation (***) had a more divisive reaction, though the easy charm of many scenes compensated for other sections in which fictional characters conversed solely in research and rhetoric derived from Schlosser’s non-fiction text. You could call it the Syriana of meat. New ones by Ken Loach (the talky but underdeveloped The Wind That Shakes the Barley) and Nanni Moretti (The Caiman, an ambitious but diffuse analysis of Berlusconi’s impact on Italy) fared about the same. Even the competition’s two finest films — Climates (****), a beautifully shot portrait of a fraying relationship by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Lights in the Dusk (****), a typically droll and masterfully controlled tragicomedy by Aki Kaurismáki — were not bold enough to make converts beyond the directors’ existing cults of admirers.

The biggest conversation piece has been Southland Tales (**), though not for nice reasons. The sophomore effort by Donnie Darko writer-director Richard Kelly was one of the festival’s most anticipated entries, especially by distributors looking for something hot, new and hip. It was set to be Kelly’s Pulp Fiction, a grand, Palme d’Or-worthy fulfillment of an indie hotshot’s potential. That it all goes so spectacularly bust is a crushing disappointment. Southland Tales is set in Los Angeles in 2008 and features a large gallery of motor-mouthed characters, including Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as an amnesiac movie star, Sarah Michelle Gellar as a dim-witted porn queen and Seann William Scott as unhinged twins trying to find each other. Meanwhile, neo-Marxist revolutionaries wage clandestine war against America’s right-wing government and a German corporation that has created "fluid karma," a new power source generated by the energy of the oceans. All these events set the stage for the end of the world, just as you’d expect.

Trying to figure out the storyline is like reading every other page of an already baffling graphic novel (Kelly has written a companion comic book, too). Flashes of brilliance occasionally break through the murk. At its best, it’s like an Irwin Allen disaster movie scripted by Philip K. Dick on an amphetamine binge. Kelly also incorporates savvy nods to Mulholland Drive and a host of LA-pocalypse movies (Repo Man, Strange Days, Kiss Me Deadly). But it mostly feels noisy, glib and maddeningly incoherent. Even the scene in which a blood-smeared Justin Timberlake lip-synchs to The Killers’ "All These Things That I’ve Done" as girls in tight vinyl Red Cross outfits frolic behind him ain’t much cop — and how the hell do you fuck that up? I gotta ask Kevin Drew what he thinks when I see him at the next film festival.