It was to have been India's answer to Cannes, the glitziest cinematic experience on the French Riviera. Instead, the 35th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) ended up looking like the poor country cousin of a venue some thousand miles west across the Atlantic. A Bahamas film festival with plenty of sun, fun and sand, but utterly insignificant on the world cinematic map.

The Bollywood brigade flattened what remained of the rest of the world cinema and took centrestage. It began with a promotional bang-Subhash Ghai's publicity blitzkrieg for Kisna-with live performance by A.R. Rahman, a spellbinding rope dance by lead star Isha Sharvani and the pithy ''festival means festivity'' soundbites by the showman. Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar phoned in reinforcements to sex up the inaugural function and, lo and behold, Manisha Koirala parachuted into Goa. Karan Johar steered the Yash Johar retrospective though you wouldn't need to be Einstein to figure out exactly what Johar senior's finest production was. And by the time Amitabh Bachchan's silver Sonata glided in to announce his joining Brad Pitt and Beyonce Knowles as brand ambassador for the Nelson Mandela Foundation for aids awareness, one would have had a hard time believing it was an international film festival.

COUPLE OF THE WEEK
HANDS ON: Aamir Khan was spotted at the opening ceremony with his new companion, Kiran Rao, Ashutosh Gowarikar's former assistant. The two flew back to Mumbai after a night out.	CANNES CLONE: Well, not quite. Beach screenings at Panjim.

''It's a weekend retreat at the government's expense,'' fumes Mansarovar director Anup Kurian. ''Bollywood is not representative of Indian cinema.'' The choice of films weighed on the minds of the foreign delegates, especially those running a silent behind-the-scenes quality check. ''One thing the organisers might want to watch out for,'' says Bertrand Moullier, director-general of the International Federation of Film Producers Associations, ''is that this is an international film festival. They must put international filmmakers on centrestage and look at the selection of films more seriously.''

And the films? The fest opened with Vanity Fair, Mira Nair's take on the ascent of William Makepeace Thackeray's social mountaineer Becky Sharp-slaughtered critically and commercially at the box office two months ago. It was to close with Oliver Stone's $180 million (Rs 810 crore) bisexual blunder, Alexander, stripped of its greatness and heading for a box-office disaster. Bringing up the roadkill were films like Revathy's Phir Milenge, which snuck into the festival under its aids smokescreen. The fest could well have replaced its Golden Peacock with the Golden Turkey. Films like Walter Salles' inspiring The Motorcycle Diaries were few and far between.

THE MOVIE BUFF                                        THE STAR SHOW
FILM VET: Konkona Sen Sharma added to her collection of 14 film festival passes. Aparna Sen's daughter started early. Her first festival was Moscow 1989, at 12.	BOMBAY TO GOA: The Big B's attire reflected the business-with-pleasure mood, all-white casuals. Later, it was a T-shirt with 46664, Mandela's number during his Robben Island days.

First year flaws? Not quite. The festival has been around for over three decades and has only shifted venue, an achievement Vidhu Vinod Chopra said was no mean feat: ''The festival has been taken out of the clutches of Delhi babudom and the dreary confines of the Siri Fort auditorium.''

''There is a sense of festivity that was missing earlier,'' says Amit Khanna, president of the Film Producers Guild of India, who convinced the I&B Ministry to shift the venue to Goa. The poor global fare could be because there are over 600 international film festivals. ''Unless the festival is important,'' Khanna admits, ''you won't get good films.''

The IFFI has a long way to go. Even the victory over the move-out from Delhi was shortlived because the Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF) babus merely moved to Goa. Chaotic would have been a polite word for the inaugural function. Invitees like Mira Nair and Chopra Shetty looked like party crashers hunting for seats and hordes of angry delegates were shut out of the venue because the number of passes issued by the DFF exceeded the seating capacity. Meanwhile, the DFF continued its behind-the-scenes cold war with the Goa Government. When the DFF shut its counters for delegate passes on day one, the state government promptly set up single-window clearance to issue emergency passes.

THE TONGUE TWISTER                             THE ROPE TRICK
CLASS ACT: Time may be gaining on Dilip Kumar-audiences gasped when he referred to the I&B minister as Jaisimha-but the thespian who turns 82 this month floored them with the self-deprecatory mono act on his memory.	SMOOTH OPERATOR: Ghai promoted his Kisna with a Rahman-Sivamani performance and a spellbinding acrobatic show by his latest find, Isha Sharvani. "To open the fest with Rahman was an honour," said 19-year-old Sharvani.

It was really a one-man show. Even until last month, the prospect of Goa staging the IFFI looked, well, iffy. But the state's no-frills chief minister had already made the event a personal crusade to prove that the thumb-sized state with the population of south Mumbai, a two-cinema capital town, Panaji, and no film culture to speak of, could host an international event. He spared no attempts to clone the King of Festivals. Last year, he sent a delegation to the world film capital, fiercely resisted attempts to snatch the venue from Goa and gave the state a Rs 100 crore-plus steroid shot-a four-screen multiplex in six months, a new bridge and a road, cut-paste green lawns, interlocking pavement tiles, porta-loos and street lights in one month. The kind of quickfire change not witnessed at least since the mythical Parashuram shot an arrow in the sea to create the state. Wooden jetties were hastily built on both sides of the Mandovi to ferry star delegates on special launches. Hollywood fare, like Mission Impossible, was screened on the beaches of Miramar and Calangute to complete the cinema-tourism circle.

THE BEACH BABE

DIRECTOR'S CUT: Vanity Fair opened the festival but director Mira Nair is already on to her next film, Namesake, which starts shooting in February. Her leading lady? Konkona Sen Sharma.

The trouble is that Parrikar's Cannes delegation seems to have missed the wood for the trees. Sure, Cannes has morphed from a sleepy Mediterranean seafront town into the place to be each spring, with its elegant parties, global swish set on thick red carpets and the most likely place to spot Arnold Schwarzenegger and Hugh Hefner creating paparazzi splashes by zooming in on speedboats. But it is also about serious cinema. Each year, a star is uncovered in Cannes and it doesn't always mean Uma Thurman's backless evening gown-both Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino were Cannes finds.

Critics argue that democracy could take root in Iraq faster than a film culture sprouting on the sands of Goa and that the money spent on the festival could have easily been spent on giving a platform to the next Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Instead, it funded an infrastructure enterprise that could have been held anywhere. Mumbai, perhaps, at a far lesser cost. And it even has beaches.

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