It’s 4.30am. I’m sitting on a tiny stretch of private beach. I’m drinking whisky and coke. Scratch that: I’m drinking free whisky and coke. Behind me, a party for a film that I’ve never heard of is in full swing. Women who look like they do this kind of shit all the time are going nuts on the dance floor. In front of me, the lights of mega-yachts illuminate the harbour, and visions of what’s happening onboard are swimming around my head. I can feel the cool kiss of the Cannes film festival seducing me. Fuck.
I’m not supposed to be in Cannes. I don’t like it. Yeah whatever, a ton of amazing films play here every year, but they’ll play in London in a couple of months too, and I won’t get a sunburn while watching them. And I won’t be surrounded by screaming mobs of Neanderthals who’ve waited all day in the sun for a five second glimpse of some celebrity tart who’s swanned in first class for a couple of days RnR.
The thing about Cannes – with its Pixar screenings, its tribal hierarchies, its Hollywood fixation – is that it’s journied a long way from where it began, and it makes me feel nostalgic. Cannes was founded in 1939 as an overtly political riposte to the fascists in Venice. It has a grand history of glamour (not to be confused with celebrity) and agitation. This is the place where critics cared so passionately about film’s place in world culture that they brought the event to a standstill in sympathy with the rioting students in ’68. It’s impossible to imagine that happening today, here where gaggles of hacks cluck like geese about who’ve they seen (not what) and where they drank. That world is a matey, clubby, boys’ own horror show of empty bullshit and posing. There’s more to Cannes than that, for sure – it’s also an important movie market – but it feels like it’s no longer about the films.
So why am I here? To take a look, I suppose. See if I’m right or not. But also, I’m realising, to understand that you can’t knock it until you’ve tried it, because until you’ve tried it, until you’ve been tempted with your special piece of the Cannes club, you can’t understand how alluring it is. But then again: fuck that. That’s the problem, you have to reject the sideshow celeb freakery, and concentrate on the films. Which is what I intend to do. So I’m starting in about an hour with my first ever Cannes film – Independencia (pictured) by Raya Martin. I don’t know anything about it except one thing: there’ll be no one there that I recognise, and that’s a good start.
