Too tired to think of a good title, so... here you go.

I'm finishing up my first French load of laundry (an experiment I'll write about in the next day or two). Here are the few days I've had time to catch up on.

Lauren

17 May 2007

To celebrate our first early premiere at Cannes, Samantha and I got up early and had breakfast at a cute café across from the Cannes train station. Another delicious and ample serving of orange juice, coffee, and bread and jam! Getting into the Palais was no big deal with our passes (scored during the My Blueberry Nights windfall), and we had plenty of time to walk leisurely up the red carpet and take some pictures.

The film, “4 Weeks, 3 Months, and 2 Days,” was amazing. We had the perfect view from the corbeille section, for starters—we sat at the very edge of the balcony and our eyes were level with the middle of the huge Lumiere screen. The film lasted about 2 hours, which admittedly seems long with talky foreign films, but the entire film was intense from start to finish as we watched a Romanian girl help her friend get an illegal abortion. Although visually the film was pretty discreet (not much blood or nudity), each shot lasted for over ten minutes and you could not get your mind away from the immediate cruelty and complexity of what both of the girls went through to protect their reputations. I didn’t feel “good” when I left the film, but the film dealt with the issue of abortion so intimately (and I would say objectively) that I think it has to be a front-runner for the Palme d’Or.

We were going to try to go see Zodiac at 3, but the intensity of 4 Months and the lack of sleep led us back to Juan-les-Pins instead. It would have been so productive to have gone for groceries in that rare bit of free time, but guess what: it was a French holiday. I ended up having time to update my journal and do a bit of cleaning around the room before I went back to Cannes around 7.

I met with my first bit of festival disappointment that night when I tried to see Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge, an Un Certain Regard film starring Juliette Binoche. After being a bit delayed by a late train and hi-definition coverage of Jake Gyllenhaal’s walk up the red carpet for the official 7:30 Zodiac premiere, I got into the line near the blue carpet (! so pretty!) only an hour early. It ended up that so many people with press and market badges wanted to get into this star-studded premiere, and since the theatre was even smaller than the main Lumiere theatre even the 70-odd people ahead of me in the Cinephile line were turned away.

I didn’t have another film to go to that night, so I wandered for a bit, getting my trade magazines and shopping a bit (I got one of the cute Cannes messenger bags—doesn’t have “Marche du Film” on the side but still makes me look official). I hoped I would find someone from the UGA group at the Cinema de la Plage so that I would have seen 2 films in the day, and I eventually spotted Freeman in line. We got good seats (and blankets!) because we were there an hour early, but eventually 7 other folks we knew showed up.

The Cinema de la Plage has a Classic Palme d’Or theme this year, and the one we saw was “Sailor et Lula,” or “Wild at Heart,” David Lynch’s 1990 winner. It was fun already to watch 800 people mill onto the beach and see the Cannes logo blowing across the huge screen in the wind, but the movie was killer. Very, very strange (and it got stranger as it went along)—intentionally campy and full of crazy violence/sex scenes like “Kill Bill” or “Grindhouse,” I would say. Nic Cage did some major kung-fu style dancing, and the movie followed a crazy parallel with “The Wizard of Oz” until the end when Glenda appears to Sailor when he’s temporarily knocked out in a gang fight. I think I’m always going to wonder about, and be a little afraid of, “buffalo-hunting.” :P

In the dark the guards could not see how guilty I looked when I spirited one of the too-few Stella Artois blankets away from the beach. It was so cozy, and I want a set of them for my apartment! We ran to the train station in hopes of catching the last train, and although we got there well before the 12:04 trip the ticket windows were closed and the coin machines were testing our gangsta. Thankfully the guards let the few in our group without tickets just get on the train anyway, and I was soon asleep in preparation for the next day’s 6:30 wake-up.

18 May 2007 (written in line at Critics' Week)

Even though I was incredibly sleep-deprived from a week of travel, late screenings, and early trains, I woke up at 6:30 am to try to see the 8:30 press screenings of Les Chansons D’Amour. I got to the train station at an awkward time—I had just missed the 6:56 train and a nice old man standing in the doorway told me about the strike. I freaked when he said there were no more trains but found out that the 8:10 was still on schedule.

I ran to the Lumiere and narrowly missed the screening. If I had had enough time to beg for tickets or to think of the French words for “Come on, there has to be a seat for such a cute girl,” it might have worked. But I think 8:30 is just too early to watch a film anyway, so no more dreams of press screenings for me.

The next film I had heard was good, Nos Retrouvailles, was showing at the Miramar at 11:00, so I had plenty of time to amble around the Croisette. The breeze was so cool and the sky completely cloudless that morning, and it was a really delicious feeling to be so on-my-own in the south of France at that moment. I scoped out a few good cafes on back alleys and looked in a dog clothes store (sadly no cute French phrases on a T-shirt for my cute French dog) and then I got in line for the hour-fifteen-minute wait.

Press and marche people still got into the theatre first, but I liked not feeling like dirt as a cinephile—we make up most of the audience at Miramar’s Semaine Internationale de la Critique, so we call the shots. The theatre felt like a high school theatre, relatively small and dim, but the excitement of having the director and his crew in attendance electrified the crowd. I couldn’t stop thinking about what a neat experience the day must have been for the first-time director—finally letting go of the work he’d dedicated so much of his life to, unsure if anyone would love it enough to take him to the actual competition in a few years or if it would tank and die at this infant screening.

Apparently critics loved Nos Retrouvailles, because the host of the program burbled about its brilliance while pumping the director’s hand, and I’ve seen at least 6 screenings of the film at more and more exclusive theaters in the last few days. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either—I couldn’t feel anything about it. The story, about a slacked son who tries to get some money for his slacker father by going with him to raid someone’s house, was absolutely average, and nothing about the story or how it was presented made me care about the film’s outcome. The soundtrack was pretty good, though, and might be like a Garden State soundtrack in France.

If it were possible for me to be depressed at Cannes, I probably was when I left the Miramar. I’m an eager film student, and I had just had absolutely no reaction to a film that respected critics thought was “great.” I attributed much to my sluggish brain, but it was unnerving.

I was going to give hooking for tickets at 30 minutes chance and then leave to sulk and/or sleep a bit. After only 5 minutes of smiling on “my corner” between the orchestra and corbeille tents, a nice press lady came up and gave me a ticket! I’m sure I just gaped at her for awhile, thinking she was just another old French lady asking to trade a badge-requiring “brun” for a free “bleu”; it was unbelievable that someone was helping me after the morning’s sleeping/eating/traveling/thinking challenges.

Les Chansons d’Amour was just what I needed at that moment. The songs (it was a musical—strange even for French art house) were so creative; they flowed together but they showcased all sorts of styles in popular music, and they could be about anything from jealousy over an overextended threesome to the beauty of Paris on a rainy day. The lead actor might know too well that he’s cute, but that doesn’t take away from the original premise that he’s cute. I could watch him with his faux-hawk, blue velvet jacket, and childish humor all day.

I was going to meet Samantha at McDonald’s (the U.S. embassy) at 4:30, but when I walked by the blue carpet at the Debussy the Cinephile line was trickling toward being empty. I was mainly curious to see if I could get in with just my badge and not a ticket, and before I knew it I was into the Un Certain Regard premiere of “L’Avocat de la Terreur.” It was a surprisingly intriguing documentary about Jacques Verges, a lawyer who had defended “freedom fighters” of most international terrorist movements of the past half-century He definitely knew how to complicate the issue of interrogating terrorists (i. e. why is it OK to torture them like they’re not our same species), but it was chilling to hear him talk about his gourmand habits while he ignored any questions about his undoubtable involvement in jailbreaks and even new terrorist acts.

I almost stood in the similarly sparse Cinephile line for the press screening of the Coen bother’s new film “No Country for Old men,” but I was getting pretty tired and feared I wouldn’t enjoy it as much as I should. It all worked out well, though, because I ran into Samantha’s friend Asam Speas at the entrance of the Majestice. We got our trade papers for the next day, read them on the train home, and found afestive group back at JLP to search for food and goof off at the beach.

19 May 2007

After a fun day on my own, I got resocialized on Saturday morning when Allison took the whole group to the gare maritime to get temporary market badges. Everyone looked as tired as I was, which was kind of a relief (I’m not the only one!), but we all had fun swapping stories about crappy market screenings and techniques for procuring tickets. As usual, the gare maritime was not where we needed to be, so we trundled over to the Palais and the badges materialized.

I took a brief tour of the marche with Allison and some of the guys. Since the red carpet and the blue carpet were already taken, a bright green carpet leads into the basement of the Palais where the marche is. At the entrance shelf after shelf holds all imaginable trade journals—I impressed an actual market guy by quickly snapping up a Screen (my favorite mag) while he still looked for his picks. We all got pretty excited when we walked by a ticket counter in the basement, and I tried using the automatic machine while one of the Adams tried the “I don’t speak French” card with the man at the counter. No luck—the tickets are only for real buyers and sellers, and even then they’re often “stand by” seats—but the flashing signs for 20 tickets left to “Sicko” and 69 tickets left to “Breath” were tantalizing.

A lot of people did what ended up to be the smart thing by going to the Cinephile office to get tickets, but I made a beeline for my corner to look for tickets to the Coen brothers’ new movie, “No Country for Old Men.” Sure enough I had a ticket within 20 minutes, and Samantha, Kaison, and I walked up the red carpet to some decent seats in the center of the balcony. I could definitely tell the film was based on a Cormac McCarthy novel after the hell I went through reading “Suttree” for my American lit class this past semester; the story ambles like a true Southern tale, starting in the middle and assuming you know certain information, quiet and slow like a Southern drawl until a moment of extreme violence surprises you. I was nervous throughout the whole film (a scene where the main character waits to be ambushed in a hotel room made me stop breathing in suspense at one point), and Javier Bardem made absolutely the most methodical, creepy, and purely evil villain I have seen in a long time. Two thumbs up, even if I’m not sure if it really ties with 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days like Screen said it did.

We went to McDonalds for lunch (to get something besides paninis), and it was a madhouse. It really isn’t that much cheaper than any other food, but the entire American audience at Cannes seems to think so. I got a “Chicken Mythic,” which had breaded chicken, lettuce, tomato, and zesty mayonnaise, and it was pretty darned good. Amanda met us and told of her last minute “date” with the creepy Frenchman who gave her a ticket, and Tolu told us an even better story when she got in from Juan-les-Pins. Apparently she met this producer from Atlanta in a shared taxi, and since the woman was going back to Atlanta early she gave Tolu her producer’s badge! What a windfall! Tolu’s really modest about it and doesn’t use it much or uses it to get tickets for her friends, but she definitely had the best day ever that day!

No afternoon films really interested me, so I went back to JLP around 3. I finally had some time to do me: I washed the dishes, cleaned up all of my trade papers, and wrote on my blog (as you can tell, I’m always a few days behind on my write-ups). We tried to get back to JLP for The 11^th Hour, Leonardo DiCaprio’s global warming documentary, but the train got us in really late. I broke away from the group at a run, anticipating a fight with the guards about my lowly temp badge, and they ended up refusing me entry. Samantha and about 5 others got in but queued up too late and were denied even though they had tickets. The story came out later that night that Freeman actually shook Leo’s hand after the screening (!), and that Bill, Laura, and Mandy hopped the line to eventually meet (and take Facebook profile pictures with) Darryl Hannah, who was in the audience. Very cool.

I huffed back to the train and almost had a blowout. The lines for the ticket machines were huge, and I eventually got up to the one that didn’t take change or read my card. I then got in an even huger line, minutes ticking down toward my train’s departure and no chance to leave for another hour, and the lady at the counter told me I couldn’t get the student discount (it was a “white” day? but she gave other kids the discount later. I will kill her on sight if we ever meet again). I got on my train just as the doors were shutting and found a seat but next to a smelly person. I was pissed, but I tried to let it go as I walked down Marechal Joffre to my apartment.

The extra time at night was pretty good for me. I finished up all the chores I wanted to do during the day (like starting my first review), and I got to chill a bit since I really was overtired. I got to bed and took an AmBien, which had some sinister effects later in the night...