Da Vinci Code premiere kicks off Cannes Film Festival
The world premiere of the controversial movie The Da Vinci Code will open the 59th Cannes Film Festival today.
The movie, starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou, is expected to be one of the blockbusters of the year.
But it is only one of 55 films from 30 countries being shown at the two-week festival, which boasts 48 world premieres.
The Da Vinci Code is not in competition for the main prize at the glamorous French Riviera event, but two British names are.
Radical film director Ken Loach is in competition for The Wind that Shakes the Barley, starring Cillian Murphy and set in the run-up to the Irish civil war.
Briton Andrea Arnold has been selected for the main competition of 20 films for Red Road, her first full-length film.
Arnold, 45, recently won a short film Oscar for her feature Wasp.
Stars expecting to attend Cannes this year include Cate Blanchett, Bruce Willis, Halle Berry and Penelope Cruz.
The cast of The Da Vinci Code arrived by train from Waterloo last night, before their film got a lukewarm reception at an advance press screening.
The book the movie is based on, by the American author Dan Brown, has sold more than 40 million copies since it was first published in 2003.
The controversial idea that forms the core of the story – that Jesus fathered a child with Mary Magdalene and that the bloodline survives, but was covered up by the Catholic Church – has sparked outrage.
The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams criticised the conspiracy theories surrounding the book in his Easter sermon.
Opus Dei, the catholic sect at the centre of the book, has called for the film to carry a disclaimer.
The Da Vinci Code is directed by Ron Howard, the Oscar-winner responsible for movies like A Beautiful Mind and Splash, who first found fame as Richie Cunningham in Happy Days.
Hanks, 49, plays a Harvard professor who becomes entangled in the chase to uncover a conspiracy involving everything the Holy Grail, Opus Dei and the Knights Templar.
French actress Audrey Tautou, 29, star of Amelie and Dirty Pretty Things, takes her biggest role to date as cryptographer Sophie Neveu.
Lord of the Rings star Sir Ian McKellen, 65, plays the eccentric aristocratic historian Sir Leigh Teabing.
Paul Bettany, 34, has come under attack for his role – the albino monk Silas, with the Albino Association of America requesting that his character be toned down.
The film-makers were given unprecedented access to the Louvre as well as cathedrals and chateaux across France and Britain for the movie.
At one point, the future of the film, thought to have cost £69m, appeared to be under threat because of a High Court case in London accusing Brown of plagiarism.
But Brown won the case, and in the mean time the legal action inadvertently gave the film plenty of publicity.
Hanks was recently reported as saying that the film, which sticks closely to the novel, should not be taken at face value, and that it is loaded with “nonsense“.
He said it was just a “good story” and should not be taken too seriously.
