It is one of Cannes's least likely world premieres: the new film by Hong Kong aesthete Wong Kar Wai will be unveiled tomorrow at a postcard-sized stand in the American Pavilion, wedged between a coffee shop and the bar. Wong's film is called The Follow; it's a snappy six-minutes long and has been crafted under the aegis of car-maker BMW, whose logos decorate the stand and the website, bmwfilms.com, that will show it.
The Follow is the third in a series of five films (collectively entitled The Hire) that BMW has commissioned for its site, all with 24-carat talent behind the camera. Already playing on the net are Ambush, directed by John Frankenheimer (Ronin) and scripted by Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven, Sleepy Hollow); and Chosen, directed by Ang Lee, fresh from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Further instalments are due from our very own Guy Ritchie and hot Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, of Amores Perros renown. And, lest you forget, a section of the site, entitled Machines, lists the details of every motor featured on screen.
Taken as a whole, The Hire represents a lofty attempt at corporate salesmanship. Though designed to showcase BMW's sleek motors, these films are clearly a step above ungainly promotional movies. They dance nervously on the border country between high-tone art and low-brow commerce - for who can be unaware of how decades of product placement have influenced the kind of images regularly seen on any cinema screen? David Fincher - director of Fight Club and, early in his career, possibly the slickest ad guy in America - acted as executive producer, and all the movies screened so far display the polished visuals for which car commercials have become a byword.
Fincher's participation is especially revealing. Though he's one of the nicest people you could hope to meet, his output is the perfect demonstration of how the allure of commercialism and anti-corporate rabble-rousing can exist in the same person - even in the same movie. The political posturing of Fight Club sits uneasily with the huckstering instinct behind this little earner. For that it surely must be. The BMW representative in the Pavilion shuts up like a clam at even the most casual question about the cost of the project; in a town awash with top-dollar speculation, BMW's silence speaks volumes. They prefer to point out the intricacies of the short-film cycle they have developed, which is, admittedly, pretty entertaining.
Chisel-jawed Clive Owen appears in all the films, doing lots of fancy driving; and a sixth director, Ben Younger (Boiler Room), has been hired to make two-minute "hidden" shorts that link the longer chunks. Frankenheimer, an acknowledged master of the car chase, has Owen piloting his battered BMW through a remorseless hail of machine-gun fire; the plot involves his passenger being hijacked by a van full of masked villains bent on getting their hands on a packet of diamonds. Lee's film follows Owen's attempt to protect a small Tibetan kid from another gang of car-driving thugs and is more balletic in its chase action - lots of synchronised reversing. He also has the nerve to put one of the bad guys in a Mercedes. Wong's film is more ruminative, with Owen hired by jealous husband Mickey Rourke to follow his wife. Younger's films are fast on their feet, with their own recurring hit-man character.
BMW has developed its own software, BMWPlayer, to mimic the action of a webcast on the DVD units on which they are showing the films in Cannes. (The internet is still, it seems, the arena to show off cutting-edge product, as the premiere of Mike Figgis and Damien O'Donnell's web-based Hotel - on filmfour.com - will no doubt demonstrate.)
Though the high-minded may get sniffy about it (or, what's worse, praise these efforts to the skies for their radical subversion of consumerism) the films are simply part of a tradition where even the biggest names take the corporate shilling. Straight commercials are the obvious example - Spike Lee's Nike ads, or John Woo's samba-scored football boot commercial - but directors do take on bigger projects. James Cameron, for example, made a 3D Terminator film for the Universal Studios tour. Another Cannes visitor, Francis Ford Coppola, undertook one of the most notorious - the 15-minute Captain EO, starring Michael Jackson, which was planned as part of a Disney World theme park attraction in 1986. Disney blew $17m on the film, which had to be extensively reshot. (They also deemed Jackson's crotch-grabbing as unsuitable for family entertainment and cut that too.) Coppola was still reeling from the financial and artistic fiasco of One From the Heart and was presumably grateful for the pay cheque.
None of The Hire directors has a reputation to repair, with the possible exception of Frankenheimer, whose career has only recently revived after two decades on the skids. Inarritu and Wong have something to gain, you would feel, by access to a sizeable American and European audience. Ritchie will surely be reverting to instinct, to his pre-Lock Stock days as the modern master of the beer commercial. Lee is the real oddity - a class act, successful at the box office and critically admired. Maybe he's just got a thing about cars.
• The five films that comprise The Hire can be seen on bmwfilms.com. For daily news and reviews from the Cannes film festival go to www.theguardian.com/film/cannes2001
