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It was emblematic of this never-never year that the movies were upstaged not by stars like the newly slender Robert De Niro, the long-haired Mel Gibson or the wasp-waisted (and pathologically tardy) Elizabeth Taylor, but by that Ruritanian dazzler Princess Diana (called "Lay-dee Dee" by the French), escorted by her Prince. Yet even the royals could not dodge the toxic waft of melancholy. On the day of their visit, French TV announced the death of Rita Hayworth, whose signature film Gilda had played at Cannes' first postwar festival, in 1946. The news was a poignant reminder that the only immortality is on the screen, and that a cinema that lives in the past faces a bleak future.