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A five-bedroom villa full of film company execs was cleaned out yesterday, although the thieves decently left their victims with their passports. A banker was reportedly mugged near the train station a few days ago.

Thefts are par for the course in Cannes – it is a town full of money just up the road from Marseille, the port city that is usually regarded as France's criminal hub – but usually it's just a lot of pick-pocketing and deft night-time mugging. Break-ins are unusual. With a local unemployment rate of 11.7 percent, however – significantly above the already-high national rate of 10.3 per cent – thievery is likely to become more determined than the odd opportunist handbag snatch.

Anyway, back to shiny stones and their glittering importance.

There is no denying the impact of a crystal-studded tuxedo with a floor-length chinchilla cape dusted with spangles. It'll get you seen. Even a brocade caftan, worn about the house with gold kid slippers, says a little something about you that a shirt and tie just won't.

It worked for Liberace, the twinkle-fingered pianist whose Vegas turns made Siegfried and Roy look like hard-core heteros. It works for Michael Douglas, too, playing what he describes as the best role of his life in Behind the Candelabra, which had its premiere in Cannes on Tuesday.

Behind the Candleabra is directed by Steven Soderbergh, who has officially given up making movies; it was made for HBO television, although it's a movie by any other name. It is adapted from a book of the same name by Scott Thorson, who was Liberace's lover for five years at a time when the maestro's minders considered creating the illusion of a rich heterosexual lifestyle was part of the remit.

Thorson was an animal handler on film sets. He wanted to be a veterinarian, but cast that aspiration aside when he took up the full-time position of being Liberace's secret boyfriend. He is played in Soderbergh's non-movie by Matt Damon.

It is certainly something to see the star of Basic Instinct going at it hammer and tongs with the kid from the Oceans films (just to keep up the thematic link with robberies). Douglas, in particular, has to camp it up to the point where he is recognisably Liberace without slipping into parody or mockery.

He admits he was nervous, but not for the obvious reasons. "There was this really, really good part, which doesn't come along very often, with a great screenplay, co-star, director – wow, the whole package,'' he says. ''You want to be able to deliver the goods. I'd only played gay once, in a Will and Grace guest spot."

Is it different kissing a man on screen from kissing a woman? "It's awkward in both cases, for slightly different reasons," says Damon. "Ultimately for me, I was more worried about conveying intimacy in general. Michael and I talked about that.

''We never talked about the kissing – there was nothing to say. We'd both read the script and we knew we had to do it. But I saw hiim two years before we started shooting at some premiere, I didn't know he was there and he came up behind me and all I heard was the unmistakable voice of Michael Douglas say, 'Get your chap stick ready'."

For Damon, the interest lay in the dynamic between the aging Liberace and Thorson, who had lived all his life with foster parents. "How insane that relationship and how beautiful it was. I thought the screenplay got all the complexity of a long-term relationship where there is a power imbalance, and where there is all this ... you know. I could see failed relationships I'd had echoed in that and I had been both people in different relationships in the course of my life. Without the rhinestones, but still."

After this, is there anything Damon wouldn't do for a movie? He supposes there must be, but he can't think of anything he wouldn't do for the right script and right director.

"I wouldn't want to do anything that conflicted with my beliefs about the world,'' he says. ''But f---ing Michael Douglas? That certainly wasn't the threshold."