It's not the starriest Cannes film festival - the economic downturn has put paid to many of the normal parties, including the annual Vanity Fair bash - but organisers had been confident that the festival would be graced by 'Brangelina' - the near-regal Hollywood couple, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

Pitt is still expected - to promote the Quentin Tarantino WWII bloodfest Inglourious Basterds which premieres next Wednesday - but whether 'Angie' will now accompany him is the subject of considerable gossip.

The celebrity rags are filled with stories that the couple's relationship is on the rocks. According to Now magazine, Pitt, 45, is so unhappy with Jolie that he has been begging his former wife, the Friends actress Jennifer Aniston, to take him back.

The magazine reports clandestine meetings in a New York hotel and boozy heart-to-hearts with Aniston about his troubled life with Jolie and their household of mainly adopted children. (Two are natural twins, with whom Jolie was heavily pregnant the last time she came to Cannes.)

Aniston is reported to have told a friend that she bears no grudge against Pitt for having walked out on her five years ago when he fell in love with Jolie on the set of Mr and Mrs Smith. Aniston apparently said she would welcome him back into her life - "as long as she didn't have to be friends with Angelina. He agreed."

Jolie has another excuse not to appear in Cannes: she is currently filming on location in Albany, upstate New York, playing a CIA officer accused of being a Russian spy in Philip Noyce's thriller Salt. Reports from the set describe her looking tearful, while a friend says: "Angie has been in some pretty dark places in her life, and now it's as bad as it's ever been."

Meanwhile, Pitt's mother is apparently urging him to dump Jolie and get back with Aniston, who clearly makes a much more acceptable daughter-in-law. Jane Pitt is said to feel Jolie is "no good". But no one ever said the stunning Jolie was a girls' girl.   FIRST POSTED MAY 15, 2009