Friday. It’s raining in Cannes and the beach looks uninviting. I guess I’ll have to go and see some movie. After all there are 200 to choose from today. It’s three days in to the Festival and a rhythm of sorts has developed.
First: find some fresh baguettes and coffee and spend an hour or so finalising a plan for the day. With 41 cinemas involved – some of which are spread out over town – it’s easy to forget to allow time for the necessary walk. Second: make myself some lunch – buying anything in Cannes will send you broke quickly: $14 for a beer in some places, $6 for a small glass of cola, $20 for a bowl of pasta. Third: with my packed lunch, official programme the size of a novel, and a bottle of water, it’s off to the screenings. The earliest start at 9.30am and they run well into the night, with the last films starting at 10.30pm in the evening. It is theoretically possible to see seven films in one day, but five or six seems more reasonable. After 10 hours the brain starts to behave like ripe camembert.
Someone told me that there are 25,000 people registered for the Festival, but surprisingly there are few queues for Marketplace films. (There seem to be a lot of people “networking”, which I take as an industry euphemism for hanging out.) Many of the cinemas are small screening rooms that seat less than 100 people and I have only seen one full so far.
Distributors and filmmakers hover at the entrance to most screenings, asking for business cards from those going in. This is – after all – a business process. In exchange for my card, I get a brochure and then I’m in. Like many other programmers and buyers, I try and get a seat on an aisle. Ten, fifteen, or perhaps thirty minutes into a film, when it’s clear that it isn’t going anywhere – or doesn’t match your market – you can escape easily. There is frequently an exodus at about the fifteen-minute mark.
Above this ruthless business-like world of the Marketplace – all dark rooms and swapping of email addresses– is the glossy and rarified atmosphere of the Official Competition, probably the most well known in the world. Twenty films have been selected this year – including new films by Ang Lee, Pedro Almodovar, Ken Loach, Lars Von Trier, Jane Campion and the enigmatic Quentin Tarantino, who everyone seems to be waiting for.
You can’t buy tickets to see the In Competition screenings – even though the huge Lumiere Theatre, where these films are screened, holds over 2000 people. These are the red carpet, invitation only events that are milked for every possible drop of publicity and promotional value. There is more red carpet than tarmac at the entrance, and as I made my way home on Day One, I passed the crowds lining up outside the Palais de Festival to welcome the stars of UP. Throngs of young women in blue t-shirts handed out balloons to the crowd. There was an attempt to lift a small house off the end of a pier using an enormous bunch of helium balloons, but it was abandoned because of the wind.
Everyone cheered anyway. Wait ‘til Tarantino gets here with Brad Pitt. Then things will take off. And whilst I am pretty sure I’ll not get a ticket to Tarantino’s film Inglorious Basterds, I do have a cunning plan to get to an opening or two. I have found a way to get tickets – a legal way.
Registered participants are allocated points at the start of the Festival and can use these to acquire invitations to Opening nights when they haven’t been given away to more worthy people. I log onto one of a bank of Festival computers and discover I have 120 points. Getting to Tarantino’s film might take 100 points – if anything’s available. Jane Campion is only worth 40. But it doesn’t really matter – there’s nothing to bid for yet – I have to check every few hours.
There are two films I’d love to get to: Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, and Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. I’ll be back tomorrow to check. Fingers crossed.
