I lost a bet this afternoon. Before I came out here, somebody told me about the whole clapping thing at Cannes. I sort of nodded and ‘yeah yeah’d’, but my god, it goes on all the time. Before the film starts, they get the directors, producers and actors. up on stage and everyone claps. Then they say a few words and everyone claps. Then the film starts and the festival logo appears and everyone claps. Then the film ends and everyone claps. Then the directors, producers and actors stand up again and… you get the idea. A woman next to me started clapping yesterday evening because the film was late starting. I wanted to point out that she was doing it wrong, but then again she’s French, so you never know.
My attitude towards clapping is that it’s a bit much. It’s like tipping hairdressers – they should do a good job for the price you pay, anything on top of that is just being greedy. But I wasn’t that surprised, I suppose. After all, not everybody is fortunate enough to share the precious English trait of propriety. So I told this guy, ‘There’s no way I’ll ever clap at Cannes.’ And he told me, ‘You will, I’m telling you. I bet you.’ So I’ve sat here not clapping. Until today. When another layer of my pre-Cannes scepticism was stripped sadly away.
At least I wasn’t clapping a film, not really. I was clapping for Sae Ron Kim, the nine-year-old star of Ounie Lecomte’s A Brand New Life. And I was joining the rest of the theatre, on my feet to acknowledge the most pure, truthful and inexpressibly moving performance by a child – by anybody – I have ever seen, in one of the saddest films you’ll ever see.
This was the story of Jinhee (Kim), a little girl who loves her dad but is put up for adoption at the whim of her step-mother. She is betrayed by the only people in her life she has ever counted on, bereft and abandoned to carve out a new life in a confusing and treacherous world. Before that new life can begin comes the agonising limbo of the orphanage and the painful acceptance that ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’ are cruel charades that grown ups use to abuse little girls.
I really can’t begin to express how emotionally devastating this film is. I left the auditorium 30 minutes or so ago, and I’m not close to absorbing it, or recovering. To say that Sae Ron Kim is mesmeric isn’t the half of it – so small, so fragile, so beautiful she will rip you apart before the film is done, and then – at the very end – she’ll put you back together. It’s an absolutely staggering performance, and the festival jury should give her the acting prize right now instead of wasting their time on the rest of the films here. So I clapped, and I cried, and it took an effort of will to stop doing both.
As an aside, though: it’s extremely weird to be riveted to your seat with tears running down your face, only to see the actress who’s put you in that state wandering past on her way to a loo break. Only in Cannes, I suppose…
Speaking of which, it’s absolute fucking bedlam right now – I can hear screams coming through the window of the press office. The Inglourious Basterds premiere has brought the Croisette to a shuddering halt and everyone is going bananas – mainly over Robert Pattinson as far as I can tell (girls: I read that he doesn’t shower and smells like a corpse, fittingly enough for a vampire). The police have blocked the roads and earlier literally stopped traffic so that two Dolce’d dolly birds could cross the road. I shit you not. It’s the feudal festival spirit gone mental.
One other Cannes quirk worth mentioning is the practice of ticketless people standing all day in the sun outside the Palais and the press area begging for tickets. Or not begging exactly, more asking politely with little pieces of paper they hold up where they’ve written which ticket they want. Actually, fuck it, that is literally begging. Still, good luck to them.
