The world's most zuper-fabulous film festival began with an apocalyptic bummer of a movie about blind people -- being brutally degraded-- and then quickly moved on to cartoon pandas and Angelina Jolie, who is heavy with twins.

So it was sweet and sour. Angie? She positively glowed in a green Grecian-style gown, like a ripe pea pod on the red carpet for the world premiere of DreamWorks' animated "Kung Fu Panda," mugging first with a quickly tiresome Jack Black in full-tilt promotion mode beside a plushy costumed panda mascot with devil eyes. Then Jolie returned to the valet line to retrieve her real-life life-partner and to stroll/pose/waddle up the grand stairs in her Nike-soled flats. And there it was: He. The sexiest man alive. Her. The sexiest woman alive. Obviously. Been. Making. Babies. The paparazzi, they go wild, documenting . . . the evidence.

Earlier at a bizarre press conference that somehow managed to combine questions about the victims of the Burmese cyclone, childhood obesity and kung fu, Jolie, who is eight months pregnant, confirmed she was eating for three, and she delighted the locals by saying that she and Brad may linger in France and deliver the twins here (vs. Namibia the last time), which would make the babies . . . sorta French. (The couple are currently bunking at zillionaire Microsoft founder Paul Allen's Villa Maryland at nearby Cap Ferrat).

So this is the Cannes International Film Festival: an elegant pregnant lady in low-cut evening gown strolling through a Riviera Coney Island as French hicks gnaw on their baguettes, begging for freebie tickets for the latest in Hungarian cinema. The high-low thing? Somehow it just works. The genius is that the most blatantly commercial blockbusters, such as "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," which premieres here Sunday, can coexist with a film such as "Leonera" from Argentine director Pablo Trapero, which screened Thursday. It is about female felons in prison (with their toddlers behind bars). It is not a comedy.