Although the boys of 'N Sync don't have a movie in this year's Cannes Film Festival, hope can spring like a geyser when you're the biggest-selling pop act since, well, the Backstreet Boys. Even if, as it turns out, the members of 'N Sync don't have even a script for their planned movie debut, which shoots in January, they were treated like future film stars at a cozy late-night cocktail party Tuesday on the beach for just 300 close friends. With each member of the quintet accorded security guards, the boys mingled with the crowd. But mingle had specific connotations. When one young woman asked Chris Kirkpatrick to pose with her three girlfriends so she could take a snapshot, he obliged — but his security folks objected and tried to stop the picture from being taken.

The low-key affair was planned so that the invites went out at the last minute to a select few. That could account for the absolute absence of fans outside the party. "It's kind of nice to be able to go around and shop," Justin Timberlake reckoned.

A pop star of a different stripe stars in this year's most eagerly awaited film in competition at Cannes. Icelandic oddball Björk makes a sensational film debut as Selma, the dying heroine of Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, an original musical with a nod to The Sound of Music. Björk wrote the music and Von Trier and a collaborator wrote all the lyrics.

Although the singer attended the gala premiere, she did not do any press. That left Von Trier, Catherine Deneuve (who plays her best friend), and others to face the press conference following the screening, where interest centered on the feud between the notoriously demanding Danish director and his idiosyncratic leading lady. One Danish newspaper had reported that Björk had ripped up her costume, walked off the set, and stopped production for four days. When she returned, she was accompanied by lawyers, demanding to be released from the film (something that didn't happen).

"Björk is not an actor, which is a surprise for me because she seems so professional," said Von Trier. "And that's what's so good about this film: she's not acting, she's feeling it. It was hard on everyone.

"I must say work with Björk has been extremely rewarding but extremely painful for both of us," he added. "I see now that is the only way it could be."

When Deneuve was asked what it was like for her to deal with such rock-star behavior, she tore into the subject, saying attention was being misdirected away from a "special film" to focus on behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt. "I've never seen a film going well. No film goes without tension or difficulty or crying sometimes, and Björk is a wonderful person and, as Lars told you, she cannot act, she can just be. And the scenes are so hard, she could not recover from them and could not go on. It made her behave like a child who runs out of school. At the level she [attains] in the film, those things are so little and the shooting of the film was a wonderful atmosphere. Let's not give the difficulties of Björk [too much emphasis]."