Mulholland Drive: David Lynch's latest offering is unveiled at Cannes

On one side of the Channel, the film industry and general public are relishing a glittering procession of Hollywood stars, while on the other the movie diet includes - to quote official sources - "grief... melancholy, solitude, madness, the reconstruction of self."

"British films fail to make the grade at Cannes festival," groaned the press in response to the latest snub to a domestic industry which supposedly relies on lottery subsidies to make films no one wants to see. The curtain rises on the world’s biggest, starriest and most prestigious film festival tomorrow without a single British feature in the official programme.

The surprising element however is that it is Britain which has been enjoying visits from Hollywood stars - Renee Zellwegger for Bridget Jones’s Diary, followed by Nicolas Cage and Penelope Cruz, for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, while Cannes anticipates a cinematic celebration of melancholy and madness, with contributions from Bosnia and Taiwan and no fewer than seven Japanese films in the official selection.

No one wants to be left at home when everyone else has a party invite. But the menu the Cannes chefs have concocted prompts the question whether the British industry really needs Cannes anymore?

In the Sixties, festival winners included If... and Blowup, and it was not just the English-language films that connected with British and American audiences. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Un Homme et Une Femme found a place in our affections, while La Dolce Vita crossed over into our language too.

The same cannot be said for recent Palme d’Or winners like The Eel, Eternity and a Day and the Lars von Trier/Bjork musical Dancer in the Dark, which was widely regarded as having brought the award into disrepute. At least it came out in Britain: roughly half of last year’s official selections failed to get a cinema release.

Cannes likes certain directors, including the Coen Brothers and David Lynch, who have new films in the programme - The Man Who Wasn’t There and Mulholland Drive, and England’s Ken Loach, who does not. And it likes stars, and it does not seem to matter whether they are film stars or pop stars, so the festival was happy to provide a platform for All Saints last year.

The Film Council refuses to make a crisis out of the lack of British drama. "There’s always an ebb and flow of product," says their spokeswoman. "It’s just what has been in production at any one time."

Loach’s new film The Navigators is not ready. The same goes for films from other Cannes favourites Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Callar) and Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People), though FilmFour submitted several films for consideration.

Asked which stars will be in Cannes, a spokesman says those serving on the jury will definitely be there, though the original president Jodie Foster dropped out, to be replaced by Liv Ullman. "But for the others, it’s secret, I don’t know and it depends..."

One of the few films that features major Hollywood stars is Sean Penn’s murder mystery The Pledge, which promises a towering performance from Jack Nicholson. It would have premiered in Berlin, but for a legal wrangle. Nicole Kidman seems certain to attend with Ewan McGregor, for the opening film Moulin Rouge, another attempt to breathe new life into the musical, this time from Baz Luhrmann, whose Strictly Ballroom was a surprise hit a decade ago.

But most of the stars who are expected - Deneuve, Depardieu, Banderas - are European, rather than American. Antonio Banderas will be there with his wife Melanie Griffith, though she is hardly Hollywood A-List anymore, and Cannes had to promise her a special award and a screening of her 1988 comedy Working Girl.

The only English film in the Critics’ Week section is Loach’s classic antidote to the Swinging Sixties, Kes, while one of the highlights of the official selection is an extended version of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. It won gold in 1979, when it was screened as a "work in progress". More than 20 years later, it is still progressing, with the addition of almost an hour of excised footage.

Of the genuinely new films, the biggest buzz surrounds Shrek, an animated feature from DreamWorks, and Eloge De L’Amour, from director Jean-Luc Godard, a key figure in what was dubbed the French New Wave, 40 years ago.

Patrick Frater, international editor of the trade paper Screen International, believes the absence of British films is indicative of a move in the UK towards more commercial films. "We’ve got people attempting to make large-budget films for a commercial audience," he says. "They’re there to make money and treat it like a business, and that’s laudable."

A prize at Cannes can still help small foreign films, but is regarded by the major studios as akin to a tag labelling a film as "arthouse". It was rumoured Captain Corelli’s Mandolin might screen at Cannes, but only if it got the prestigious opening slot. Working Title executives were "too busy" this week to confirm or deny it.

Bridget Jones’s Diary, another Working Title film, had the best opening box-office figures of any British film, ever, and last weekend it topped the US box-office charts too. Many critics may consider Bridget Jones’s Diary less substantial than Bridget Jones, but the general public love it, which is more than can be said for most of the films that turn up at Cannes these days.

The Cannes Film Festival runs from 9th to the 20th May

Brian Pendreigh is author of The Legend of the Planet of the Apes (Boxtree)