I am well and truly fatigued! Why? Let me explain.
Visiting the Cannes Film Festival is perfectly fine,nay a pleasure with my badge: an industry badge. It gets me into everything bar the marche du film (marketplace screenings), and I can apply for red carpet, gala tickets in the Lumiere too. It’s a good badge for someone very junior in the industry who wants to come along and experience the festival. There is a snag, though. This badge is not high up the priority level of queuing and so you really have to arrive at least two hours in advance of each screening you wish to attend, to be in with a fighting chance of being let in. And that’s just what I’ve been doing up to now, with a high degree of success bar Jeremy Saulnier’s GREEN ROOM a few days ago.
Then came along Gaspar Noe’s LOVE and it’s thrown everything into disarray for me. For the purposes of transparency, decency, liberty etc. I should reveal I am writing this entry on Day 9 and will use today’s LOVE queue as evidence too. But let’s go back to yesterday evening, a time of optimism and hope for some art house pornography on the French Riviera. I’d got a ticket for the midnight screening of LOVE on Wednesday night. This gave me a seat, a time to arrive to queue, and a general sense that your ticket means you have a place in the cinema. Oh no. One hour and forty-five minutes into queuing, when the director and his cast had walked up into the cinema, we were turned away. All six hundred or so of us (if you count the queues on both sides of the red carpet). We’d got out tickets and our seats, but the festival wasn’t letting us in to the screening. There’s only one official way up into the Lumiere, and that’s the red carpet. You can come at it from the left-hand or right-hand side, but there aren’t any special staircases or secret doors that they let the crowds of cinema-goers up through, if the red carpet gets blocked by late-coming talent. And this happens a lot. Surely this is an issue which needs a back-up plan in place at a festival of Cannes’ size? For CAROL, we were at least ushered into another screen to watch the film fifteen minutes after the main Lumiere show had started. It seems like an enormous waste of everyone’s energy to ask them to queue for that length of time and then deny them access with their ticket.
Why generate that ill-feeling for a film? I suppose the answer is: because it’s Cannes. Fast forward to today (Thursday morning) and I queued for two hours and twenty minutes to get into the repeat screening of LOVE. I was at the front of the queue too. But as this screening is open to the press as well as us industry and market badge holders, we knew we didn’t stand a chance when three hundred and fifty press turned up well in advance, for a screen which only seats four hundred and fifty people. Edinburgh and London run successful shadow screenings for the press in smaller satellite cinemas around the their cities. There’s no reason that couldn’t happen at Cannes too, other than the fact that this festival is more or less closed to the public and is just industry anyway.
It’s just a tiresome and somewhat futile experience to queue that long and for it all to be to no avail. I met up with my friend Loretta after this second LOVE queue fail, and she very wisely put her hand on my shoulder and said: “I know you are glum, but they’re just films, and they will come to the UK eventually.” I needed to hear Loretta’s words, as there’s nothing like queuing for that long, two days on the trot, to make you feel bummed, when really I know this is an incredibly privileged opportunity to be able to visit the festival. Chin up, Jack!
On to more positive matters, I finished off the delightful trilogy of films by Miguel Gomes, ARABIAN NIGHTS on Wednesday morning. This has been the festival experience highlight for me over the past five days. A journey into contemporary Portugal, via the framework of the Arabian Nights stories, and through the mind of a great director. If you get the chance to, upon its UK release, I urge you to watch it in a similar way over a few days. Fingers crossed for the Cambridge Film Festival! I also watched my first Indian film of the festival, Neeraj Ghaywan’s MASAAN, a contemporary coming-of-age tale in modern day India, with two protagonists whose life experiences ever-so-gradually start to weave together. The film made me want to visit this vast and wondrous country, far more than the efforts of THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL. I also feel very pleased to have seen the first ever Ethiopian film screening in Un Certain Regard, Yared Zeleke’s LAMB – in which a young boy and his pet sheep move from their home valley to a family member’s far-off in search of work and food. The film is a very gentle yet engaging family drama, with the conventions of Ethiopian farming life opening out ahead of me – a way of life I’d never had cause to imagine before. The director and the cast were in the cinema to introduce the screening, and bless him, Yared got rather tearful in the five to ten minute round of applause after the film. That’s what you want to hear about, some positivity from an otherwise sun-burnt, over-tired lover of film in the French Riviera!
I’m trying my best to get some more interview squeezed in whilst I’m here, as well as watching some more films of course! I believe that staying at a film festival for this length of time will always mean some fallow days are experience. Hopefully I’ve put those behind me now and I can end my time here on a high with VALLEY OF LOVE, THE LITTLE PRINCE, MACBETH and LA GLACE ET LE CIEL. I’ll keep you posted!
httpvh://youtu.be/ONW0HCpY_UM