Even what looks like a workable agreement this morning between the majors and the actors couldn't quite clear away the malaise that a gloomy May, with rainy spells both on the French Riviera and the west side of Los Angeles, had brought to the business.

It could have been a fine week for the American film industry to coast to a number of claimed victories. The forces had surged into Cannes with what looked like a sure-fire global blockbuster in Indy 4 (and sure enough, it is that), and several further cinematic claims on the imagination and pocketbooks of a worldwide film-going public.

We had Changeling in competition from Clint Eastwood, the common man's thinking man, and also Synecdoche, New York, from Charlie Kaufman--the biz's token, rogue intellectual with a building box office arc as a screenwriter (Being John Malkovich and Adaptation each made over $22 million, and 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind made $34 million). And as depicted on this site prior to the festival, we had Steven Soderbergh's Che covering a swath of modern history (and Latin American real estate), and French critical favorite James Gray hoping to export his Fifties-gritty, Paltrow-returns, latest vision of life in the outer-borough New York, Two Lovers.

Well, something happened on the way to the winner's podium--and the marketplace. A by-all-accounts deserving French film (Class, known there as Entre Les Murs) swept in at the last minute to take the top prize, Che was widely written off as needing more work (though a few pundits actually prescribed expanding it beyond its current four-and-a-half hours), Eastwood was granted faint praise, and Kaufman as writer-director won mostly sympathetic mutterings.

Gray's film was adored by some critics, dismissed by others. Though its guaranteed a release through an in-place deal with the perfectly capable Magnolia, some thought it would fetch an attractive enough offer, from one of the studio specialty divisions, to declare a win in the acquisition sweepstakes. At something under $12 million in production costs, with a robust slate of foreign buyers already underwriting it, the production from Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's 2929 Entertainment isn't in desperate need of a bidding war. And a good thing, too, since it's still on the sidelines of the distribution market--a sign of this year's Cannes phenomenon in which a host of compactly budgeted pictures were picked up, notably by IFC and Sony Classics, for compact prices.

Those looking for a wide-ranging scan of the artsier festival fare could do worse than Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw's exhaustive (if, per the comments, originally typo-laden) final word on the roster. And Indie Wire described a late-festival mood marked by the big buyers' apathy.

If the American contingent was irritated after paying princely prices for peasant fare, sometimes with a degree of fishy bill manipulation (caveat emptor at the Croisette-side seafood joint Coquillage Brun), they came home to the news that well-regarded industry veteran Sydney Pollack had finally succumbed to a cancer that seemed more mysterious but no less determined than that his character had tried to combat in Johny Sack during Pollack's guest spot on The Sopranos.

Pollack was not only a compellingly warm and gentlemanly presence. (I once attended a dinner where those assembled almost begged him to prolong the story of his housekeeper, who won millions in the state lottery but continued working for him, which tells you something about the man and his household). He could be feisty--when I called him up for comments for a career-retrospective piece on Dustin Hoffman, in which the actor went through his familiar soliloquy admitting how he had tortured the director during the making of Tootsie, he was initially a bit surly at the memory.

But Pollack carried a stage actor's casual grandeur with him, from his days as a potential acting star on Playhouse 90 through a long career making the better sort of star vehicles. He managed to let Robert Redford burrow into character in Three Days of the Condor and as a result created an ominous thriller whose political bent foretold later films like the Bourne series.

Back at the box office, Indy4 brought in $311 million worldwide in its five-day Memorial Day opening, second only to Pirates of the Caribbean for that date. If such a thunderous debut (see the Los Angeles Times account of its near-record results performance) can have a downside in the business, it may be that almost no reviewers are fully embracing the picture--for which three out of every 10 attendees were parents bringing their children--as more than a canny vehicle for putting Indy back on screen and fannies in seats.

Finally, the Hollywood execs coming home bleary-eyed from Cannes got to confront the ongoing and not very hopeful negotiations between the actors and the companies. Then, abruptly this morning, after nine days of talks, came the word of a tentative agreement pending approval by Aftra's membership. Crucially, the agreement addressed the actors' sticking point--they want control over how their work is deployed over the internet (and cell phones, etc.) via clips.

As the latest Variety deal agreement ">report details:

And AFTRA also said the pact retains actors' consent over online use of clips, an issue that had emerged as a dominant concern at the negotiations. Both SAG and AFTRA had opposed the AMPTP's proposal that actors agree to drop the consent requirement for online clips, in order to establish a viable business model that could compete with the massive levels of pirated clips on the web.

The AFTRA deal came with the Screen Actors Guild set to resume negotiations this morning after a three-week recess for the AFTRA talks. SAG's feature-primetime contract expires June 30 and the lack of resolution of the guild's deal had unnerved Hollywood with studios refusing to greenlight features until a new contract's signed.

Thee are still some internecine politics to be dealt with on he actors' side:

Most notably, the AFTRA deal sets a template for SAG to follow, much as the DGA deal in January set the parameters for the WGA agreement earlier this year. AFTRA's been operating in previously unknown territory by negotiating the primetime deal on its own for the first time in three decades following a bitter break-up with SAG.

But it's uncertain whether SAG will follow the terms of the new AFTRA pact, given the deeply troubled relationship between the performers unions. AFTRA split from joint negotiations in late March following a bitter jurisdictional dispute over "The Bold and the Beautiful," while SAG's repeatedly accused AFTRA of signing cable deals at lower initial terms.

Still, any optimism is of the guarded variety. Prior to the agreement, seasoned labor observer Jonathan Handel said that, "Management has shown the ability to play one union off the other, if history is our guide, but this is the year of stormy weather in May and tornadoes in Riverside County, so it's hard to know what will come next."