The beginning of the end

So the festival's done with, and so might be my journal for awhile. I'll keep you posted, but I have a feeling I'll have enough writing, at least for this week. Lots of love from France!

Lauren

27 May 2007

With the help of my snooze alarm, I slept until 11 am on Sunday, a feat never before accomplished on this trip nor in my regular life (excepting sick days). All of the competition films were being rescreened for the folks who hadn’t seen them, but I had seen most of the films and indeed all of those at the Debussy theatre, the only room Cinephiles could enter on the last day of the fest. So, I slept, took a long shower, leisurely wrote my fourth review, carefully dressed and put on my makeup, and caught a 2:45 train into Cannes to prep for my final film.

I checked a few items of my mental list of festival to-dos. I took a video of walking by the Palais; it’s not very good, but later down the road I think I’ll smile at my amateur attempt to recreate part the festival experience. Also, I looked at all of the beachside newsstands for a good price for Empire; it ends up that they all charge 7.80 euro because the mag is imported from England, but I bought one and found it was well worth the cost within the first few pages of coked-up, incredibly “me” humour (to put it the Brit way).

Other goals were not met. My brilliant idea to eat at FNAC one more time and work on my journal on the roof was foiled by the day of the week, so I took a very long Sunday afternoon stroll past all of the closed shops on the Rue d’Antibes to my final destination at *gasp* McDonalds. I got Le Menu Best Of for Le 280 (I impressed myself when I easily rattled off “deux-cents-quatre-vingts”), and it was a surprisingly great sandwich, much cheaper than my intended Chinese salad at FNAC (a good thing because I was running out of cash). And since I had secured one of the coveted small booths I felt free to write in my journal for two hours before turning on the red light for the closing ceremonies.

I hooked for about two hours in the bright sun; good thing I had slathered on sunscreen. Even in my sweaty squintiness, though, I found it really easy to smile at everyone walking by and to brush off the few people who looked confused or tried to mess with me. I got several tickets to the later showing (My Blueberry Nights all over again!), and eventually only Kaison and Freeman graced the red carpet to the star-studded ceremony.

Chris and I decided to wait for Samantha to come to Cannes for the late show, and we amused ourselves by getting a final nutella banini and tagging along with Geoffrey to the pretty average casino (gambling hall, NOT grocery store) before he caught a train home. Two hours at McDonalds again was not a terrible fate as we read through a bit of Empire. Once Samantha met us we hustled to the balcony line only to meet a lady who wanted to give us her orchestra seats! I had actually snagged one for myself earlier in the evening but wasn’t going to ditch my friends, but her pair of tickets allowed us to wait another almost-hour in the windy VIP line at the base of the red carpet. The closing ceremonies had taken a long time (oh, yeah, I did watch those and was generally pleased with the results—Javier Bardem got shafted for the best actor prize, but Julian Schnabel snagged a well-deserved best director award and the popular Persepolis shared the jury prize with Silent Light), so we had to wait past the 23h00 screening time to even get into the Palais. But it was all good, because all of the fancy stars had to walk/drive past us to get out of the city. Gus van Sant walked right by my shoulder after we had been gushing about how cool he is, and I saw the really really good-looking Diane Kruger as well as Julian Schnabel himself through their tinted Renault windows. It. was. fabulous.

My third appearance in the orchestra section was wonderful. I got in super early considering how tardy everyone was, so I got my “cote” seat only three seats down the row from where Samantha and Chris sat in the center section. I also found a secret bathroom while I was waiting and was thrilled to not have to wait in a line for once. The final out of competition film, L’age des tenebres (The Age of Ignorance), did an excellent job rounding out my festival experience. Granted, I would love any piece of crap film if it had Rufus Wainwright singing opera in it, but this one was decidedly not a piece of crap. It was funny to hear the Quebecois accents as the main character, Jean-Marc Leblanc, fantasized about being Rufus Wainwright or having an affair with Diane Kruger to take a mental break from his crappy government job and crappy wife and kids. The absurdity of everyone around Jean-Marc, from his coworkers to the road rager he hits with his car to the Ren-Fest girl he meets at speed dating, spoke to the absurdity of life in our times—no one can deny that our war on terrorism, telecommuting age can be pretty effed up. So even if we didn’t learn what happened to Jean-Marc, his quitting his job to start over at the lake house his father loved was really empowering.

It’s a strange feeling to be free of the festival. I don’t quite feel like I’m cut loose, without a purpose, because I have a feeling I’m really going to enjoy all of the writing in Nate’s and Charley’s classes the next two weeks. But the festival gave me the strange experience of not wanting to keep dreaming after the alarm goes off; I had a train to catch and two or three movies to see, and I honestly enjoyed the struggle to keep going everyday. I learned a lot about myself, like how I can either completely shut off my hunger until the next convenient moment to eat or, oppositely, eat something at every snack bar that crosses my path, or like how I can survive with only four hours a sleep per night for several nights and still be completely cheery, or like how I can carry my life around in one big purse. Several successful days alone in a town where I only half-speak the language beat a lot of my timidity/fear of rapists out of me (joking about the last one, but only halfway because I was raised to be very wary of all strangers). I had no qualms relying on the kindness of others to get into 16 of my 22 screenings at the invitation-only Grand Theatre Lumiere, but I also reaffirmed that I want nothing to do with some of these others in the industry. I’m still not sure if this entertainment writer thing is for me—it’ll take a lot more soul-searching that I frankly do not have the time for right now—but if, at this moment, someone offered me a job at any magazine or newspaper that would send me to the festival each year, I’d be ready as soon as I ate another piece of bread and nutella.