Cannes diary: Stop it, Woody. It's getting embarrassing

Some of us have been willing to stick with Woody Allen through the toughest times. Some of us were even willing to plead the case for his German Expressionist folly Shadows and Fog, for goodness' sake. But it's been getting harder of late, and with his new film Hollywood Ending, it rather looks as if the jig is up. It's a lamentable comedy that suggests Allen has lost everything that ever made his films work – his sense of humour, his timing, his ability to know when to leave a gag alone, or keep his female co-stars at least a few years over 30. He plays a failed Hollywood director whose studio exec wife (Tea Leoni) gives him one last shot at making his masterpiece. As soon as he gets on set, however, he's afflicted by psychosomatic blindness, but ends up making the film anyway. He's finally cured by reconciliation with his teenage son, a green-haired punk rocker who eats live rats on stage. Good to know Woody hasn't lost his nose for youth culture.

Allen tries to make the blind-auteur gag sustain the film, and even tries to squeeze a little satire out of it. I think he's telling us that most Hollywood directors could be working with their eyes closed anyway. He's also apparently telling us how much he loves the French. It ends with the hero's presumably catastrophic film being acclaimed in France as an American masterpiece. This is supposedly a tribute to French perspicacity – but it looks an awful lot like an off-hand insult to the nation that acclaimed Mickey Rourke as a peerless screen icon. (Cahiers du Cinema has published Allen's script, though, so maybe it's true – they will swallow anything American.)

Allen's propensity to surround himself with much younger women – who inevitably fall for his schlemihl of a character – really looks embarrassing this time, with Leoni, Will and Grace star Debra Messing, and young thing Tiffany Thiessen all fawning over him. That's not the worst of it. The gags. The pratfalls. And the hands. Enough with the hands. You hate to say it, but you don't feel optimistic about Allen getting his mojo back in a hurry.

After last year's opening night lollapalooza over Moulin Rouge, Allen's film seems a terribly low-key way to start the Cannes proceedings, especially prefaced by Festival president Gilles Jacob's fond short documentary about Cannes past and present. Lots of famous stars and directors smile, applaud, gush and shlep up the Palais red carpet. There's some charming footage, but this slackly assembled indulgence is at best like a celluloid edition of Hello!. Dare one say, Monsieur J, don't give up the day job? At time of writing, only two days in, that ho-hum feeling is setting in perilously early. Israeli director Amos Gitai looked likely to provide a controversial number with Kedma, set one week before the creation of the state of Israel, about a group of Holocaust survivors arriving off the boat and finding themselves instantly pressed into an armed conflict they can't begin to understand. In the event, this serious, rather balletic Brechtian political essay was too austere to ignite passions. And the usually reliable Marseillais director Robert Guédiguian (La Ville est Tranquille, A l'Attaque) turned in a prize dud with Marie-Jo and Her Two Loves, a rambling melodrama that's like a parody of the French marital-infidelity genre. Restless critics are hovering around the press boxes in the Palais, edgily waiting to be impressed. The weather, on the other hand, has been an out-and-out chef d'oeuvre.