CANNES, France - Michael Moore doesn't look the part of hero, but at Cannes, he sure was treated like one.

All during the recently concluded film festival, Moore was lauded. The first screening of his film, Bowling for Columbine, a scathing and fitfully satiric look at the United States' infatuation with guns and violence, was followed by a 13-minute standing ovation, the longest anyone at Cannes could remember. His movie, already the first documentary to be entered in the festival in 46 years, was the only one that everybody was talking about.

Clearly, the French couldn't get enough of this unshaven, overweight, self-described schlub from Flint, Mich. Last Sunday, seven hours before the 55th Festival de Cannes was to close with the awarding of the coveted Palm D'Or, Moore already had started raking in the hardware. That afternoon, a group of French educators, the Jury Education Nationale, overwhelmingly had voted him their grand prize, and feted him with yet another prolonged standing ovation.

After shyly waving off the acclaim, Moore amused the educators with a recitation of his first high-school French lesson - something featuring mama and papa and their little girl. But then, turning serious, he thanked French educators for their consistent support (his first film, Roger & Me, an attack on corporate America, is a part of the French curriculum). He praised the French people for soundly defeating right-wing presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen in last month's presidential poll. And he lauded audiences in Cannes for appreciating his film as the cautionary tale he intended.

A serious film

"I want this movie to act as a warning to this country and to other countries," Moore said. "If you as a society allow this sort of violence, if you allow your government to beat up on those who have little or nothing, you will end up like us."

Moore stepped offstage, ambled slowly to a small table in an adjoining meeting room - 12 straight days of anything, even adulation, can tire a man - then sat down to accept even more plaudits, pats on the back and autograph requests. And that was only the start of Moore's big day. By the time Cannes closed Sunday, Moore would also have in his possession a special award from the film festival jury, a U.S. distribution deal with United Artists, and the knowledge that - for the moment, at least - he has supplanted such cinematic stalwarts as Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese as France's favorite American.

"Oh man, that is such a typical American question," Moore says in maybe-mock disgust when asked how it feels to be the new Jerry Lewis. And if he is genuinely bothered by the question, perhaps his frustration is understandable. While it has its satiric moments, there's nothing funny about the underlying message of Bowling for Columbine, or about the reasons the French are flocking to it so.

"The Europeans are not taking this film as if they're laughing at us or whatever," Moore explains during a rare break, after being interviewed for a French television show and before sitting down to a quick seaside lunch with his wife, producer Kathleen Glynn. "They're taking it as a warning. If they continue down this road they're on, they'll have the same thing. I mean, we're not worse than they are, they're not better than us, simply because they don't kill each other. They just haven't gone down the path we've gone down."

In Bowling for Columbine, Moore does more than simply document America's bloodlust; he tries to get at its root. Sure, there's security-camera footage of the 1999 shootings at Columbine High (teen murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold started their big day with a trip to the bowling alley), a frustratingly fruitless interview with NRA President Charlton Heston; and a tearful visit with the principal of a Flint-area elementary school, where a 6-year-old girl was shot and killed by a 6-year-old classmate.

But at the heart of the movie are Moore's attempts to explain America's predilection for violence and to understand why other countries have nearly as many guns, show just as many violent movies and have just as violent a history, but don't kill one another in as nearly great numbers.

"If it was human nature, they'd be doing it here in France," Moore says. "Or in Canada. How about the Swiss? In Switzerland, it's the law, you have to have a gun in every house, because they have no standing army. Virtually every home has a gun, and yet they only had 70 or 80 murders last year."

Braced for criticism

Moore sees fault all around, but most of all, he sees in the United States a society where people are afraid, where leaders would rather fuel that fear than calm it. He sees the political reaction to Sept. 11 as a defining example of what's wrong with the political climate in his home country.

"If anything, the way to honor those deaths is to have more freedom now, is to have more openness, more liberty," he says. "What better way to show the rest of the world that this is what we truly believe in than by having more democracy, not less.

"But of course," he says, referring to President Bush, "I'm asking this of someone who subverted the democracy and stole the election."

Moore realizes the accolades will not continue unabated. Already, he's been portrayed as un-American by those upset at his book, Stupid White Men ... and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation, which had the temerity to criticize the president and his administration in the days following Sept. 11. (The book has spent better than three months on the New York Times best-seller list, however, suggesting he's not exactly a lone voice). He's prepared for the critics.

"The most patriotic thing one can do is to try and make [the United States] a better place for everyone who lives in it," he says, sitting back in his chair and enjoying his last day on the French Riviera before going home to a country where the response to Columbine will undoubtedly be more contentious. "America is about asking questions, and the freedom to think, and to dissent. There's nothing more American than that."