CANNES: The Cannes film festival is an uncomfortable place to be an American. Or that at least is how it is beginning to be viewed through the distorting night-vision goggles of homeland security.

While each year the Cote d’Azur grows to look a little more like California, and gin palaces bob in the bay, the players decamped from the Hollywood Hills are nervous and twitchy. A dark, hulking carapace built to launch The Matrix Reloaded on the world throbs menacingly on the Croisette, and an advance guard of robots from Terminator 3 holds a beachhead on the terrace of the Carlton hotel, from where Arnold Schwarzenegger rallied the fans for one final encounter.

But this UN of film, where English has long been the lingua franca, and deals are done in dollars, is now accused of being a hotbed of “Taliban thinking”.

And its Osama is Lars von Trier, the Danish director who is odds-on to take the Palme D’Or for a second time with Dogville, a film seen by serious US critics — a caucus of normally senatorial, liberal good sense — as an indictment of everything their country now represents.

Von Trier, a genius provocateur with an unerring sense for finding the point of pain, twisted the knife when his accusers thrust him into the cross-hairs. “I would love to start a Free American campaign because we have just had a Free Iraq campaign,” he declared to muffled cheers from the European side of the pressroom.

Dogville, however, is no more anti-American — whatever that curious catch-all Guantanamo of a phrase means — than the novels of John Steinbeck, to which it owes a great debt.

There are, though, films at Cannes as damning of America as a Friday sermon in Tehran. The nastiest begins in a subterranean Alamo as the besieged people of Zion await the onslaught of a suicidal horde programmed from bases in the deserts of Arabia to hate and destroy all that is good. These are not Arabs, as you might assume, but the products of a soured society, the most technologically advanced on earth. These villains are white, corporate-suited and all named Smith or Jones.

The film is The Matrix Reloaded and there is a series of shorts called the Animatrix commissioned by Warner Brothers to fill in the mock-historical backdrop behind the $300m Hollywood trilogy. One Animatrix film tells how the robots, once the oppressed slaves of man, rose in a Million Machine March to demand civil rights. One dies crushed under the tracks of a tank in a scene straight from Tiananmen Square.

As with the Terminator, which uses the same thin philosophical veil of man versus machine, the message is simple. If the rebellious robots had been stamped out straight away, Zion would now be safe.

It’s the familiar equation of the old west and its robber barons — kill or be killed.

Goodbye Mr Marshall, we now live in the age of blockbuster shock and awe. No one has yet accused the Wachowski brothers, The Matrix’s blue-collar Chicagoan creators, nor indeed Arnie of treason.

There have been hostile whispers too about Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s factu-drama about the massacre at Columbine, which looks for explanations in the vacant heads of high school kids but finds nothing there but a banal reflex to destroy.

Elephant takes its name from Alan Clarke’s short, sharp film about random killings in Northern Ireland. But it also stands for George Bush’s Republican party, panicked into stampedes by small mice. For von Trier’s real crime is that he is not an American; criticism of the US from without is not welcome now — even, it seems, from the card-carrying Democrats of Hollywood.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.