Having a Nice time on the Cote d'Azur

June 3-5

On Sunday most of the stragglers still in JLP met with Charley, which took awhile because he went to town on Mandy’s paper. Eventually Tolu, Kaison, and I decided to go into Antibes. Kaison said he knew the way because he had been out to dinner with Allison and a few of the others the night before, but we got lost on the narrow streets near the JLP train station and had to ask a little kid riding a bike where Boulevard President Wilson was. I gathered that it ran past the lycee, so we wandered until we hit a major road that had a high school and started walking down a street as steep as the road into Sin City and/or Lumpkin Street. There were a lot of pharmacies (as usual) as well as Asian fast-food restaurants and locksmiths (Kaison said this last species probably sprang up due to the number of car break-ins—he had already seen two on his trips to town).

Eventually we got to the middle of the city, where I had a deliciously sickening beignet a crème and Tolu got a nutella banana crepe (good, but not the same level of crunchy excellence that is the nutella banini). We wandered through the old part of the town (the only pretty part), found the hidden archaeological museum on the coast, looked at porno art at the open-air market, found but could not eat “Mexican nachos” (the kitchen was closed?!), and toodled back home past a lot of other good-looking food before I grazed in my room.

I was planning on going to Beaulieu-sur-mer on Monday to look at a Greek mansion and another mansion full of statues on the coastal mountains, but the train I wanted to take was cancelled. So, I improvised and took myself to Nice with Samantha’s directions and had a great time just doing me. I looked in a few shops I had missed with the big group (the McDonalds closer to the beach was too cool! It had stonework on the inside!) and made my way to the beach over the heavily under-construction Place Massena. The beach was in its natural form—covered in little rocks, with no sand—but it was about as crowded as the beaches in Antibes since it was a nice day.

I spotted the “white thing” Samantha had told me about pretty quickly and made a beeline for it, power-walking behind a cute British guy. There was an “ascenseur” to take you to the top of the rock, but I wanted to be a badass and climb to the top. Bad/good idea. My legs ached after the first two sets of stairs, where I took my first pictures of the town below. But I made my way up all of the strange rock face with trees growing from it to find the ruins of a chapel, a graveyard, a waterfall, and two restaurants/souvenir stands. Different sides of the rock showed every bit of Nice, from the Bay of Angels that I was first walking along to the inland hills to the other bay, where the Corsican ferry could have taken me to San Remo (! it keeps taunting me!). I would have liked to have had someone to talk with about the beautiful view, but I enjoyed having some time to myself to just think, go where I wanted to go, and start scheming about getting my family there for a vacation.

I walked through all of the old city, looking in most of the weird chocolate shops and olive oil shops (they had a L’Olivier shop, the actual store for the fancy brand of olive oil I got my mother for Christmas! they had little olive trees for sale and I wanted one really bad!). I found not one but TWO 96 Flavors kiosks and had fig and pear sorbets at the first one. No beer flavored ice cream for me, but it was so good anyway!

I got back in time to chat with Charley for about an hour about what drinks to make (pastis) and what grade I got on my paper (A), and then I found Tolu and Kaison for our first run of French fry frying. Dinner stretched out into a late-night Grand Marnier crepe run, and I think I’m almost as addicted to those now as I am to nutella baninis.

It was weird going back to class on Tuesday. Everyone had fun stories from going to Bordeaux, Cinque Terre, and Florence, and we talked about “bad” movies and sex scenes for most of class after Allison recounted her dark tale of camping with Paul Cox in his unrefurbished French mansion. After class I got a blue Schweppes with Andy and Chris at Juan les Bread and rushed off in the rain to Cannes on what I thought was a trip to get something at Galleries Lafayette for my mother. Didn’t happen (my gift was out of stock!), and neither did a salad at FNAC since they had weird ones like Tandoori chicken and Salmon that day. For once I felt underdressed in Cannes, sticking out like a sore thumb on the Rue d’Antibes in my cheap pink flip flops, so I took to the beach and found a nutella banini, which I ate in front of the newly redecorated Palais (World Perfumery Congress this weekend)! I also made a stop by Monoprix, where I put the last jewel in my Schweppes crown with the purchase of “Citron Lychee Cactus” Schweppes.

Lazy day back in JLP. Everyone was finishing up the last paper for Nate’s class (experiential reporting—I talked about my encounter with the French businessmen, which I’ll probably post here soon), and in our boredom Tolu and I went to get potatoes for more French fries. We deep-fried a whole bag of potatoes and inhaled them with Geoffrey (hi, Geoffrey!) and a few visitors who we lured in with the delicious scent of frying sunflower oil. The cactus Schweppes went down easy, and plans were made to mix it with vodka for Andy and Chris’s screening of Little Bruno, the favorite “bad movie” discussed in class (actually a DVD one of the actors gave to the kids who dropped by the Gray d’Albion during the festival… “It’s the best fucking gangster movie you’ll ever see. I’m in it.”).

The set-up for the world premiere of Little Bruno in room 223 was impressive. They had rolled out the red carpet (one of the blankets from the hotel linen closet), and people wore their bow-ties in the roped-off “orchestre” section. I hooked my way in with one of my patented “invitation?” signs and sat on the futons in the balcony, making only a small drink for the drinking game of “drink every time something’s so bad you laugh.” I made it to the part with the guidance counselor’s sweaty moobs, but it just got too ridiculous; Samantha and I poured out our mostly unfinished drinks back in our room and watched Wedding Crashers. Around 1 we all got a text to go do tequila shots for Allison’s birthday at a bar in JLP, but I was too tired (and broke, and unwilling to get publicly plastered) and went to sleep at the old-granny hour of 1 am.

Tu vuo fa l'Americano...

May 31-June 02

We had our last class with Nate on Thursday! He had to fly back for the Peabodies—which we all understand and which many of us hope to pull some strings and attend next year—and we’ll miss him this next week despite a lineup of fun meetings with Allison. We read a few reviews of the more popular movies, but then Nate called on me to read my write-up of Les Chansons d’Amour to bring a French one into the mix. I was pretty nervous, because it was my first review and pretty awkwardly written, but even though I skipped around and stuttered a bit it seemed like everyone liked it OK. After a lot of sarcastic reviews, mine had some self-effacing humor that made my point without being mean, and it was a goofy enough movie to get a few people interested in seeing it.

I wanted to go into Cannes at least one more time, so after a few meetings with Charley several people joined me on a pilgrimage. It rained and tried to make us feel sad for the now un-decorated town, but Cannes has a lot of character anyway. Tolu and I watched me eat/ate a salad at FNAC before meeting everyone else at Subway, and then we wandered around the few stores that had souvenirs for the film fest. Lots of knock-offs for some of the kids’ parents and friends, and a new issue of Empire for me for a well-worth-it 7.80 euro. We got back around 6 and everyone had to write the rest of the night to finish up the final two reviews (!).

Friday took Tolu and me to Italy! We had heard about an outdoor flea market in Ventimiglia, the last stop on the French train and the first city across the border, and shopping fanatics as we are we could not pass it up. It cost 13 euro for a roundtrip ticket and 1:30 hours each way, but the trip was too fun! The train snakes up the coast past Antibes, Nice, and Monaco, so we got tons of beautiful pictures of ritzy beach houses and mountains falling into the sea (all, sadly, with the mark of bird crap that was on my train window :P).

Ventimiglia was a very interesting little town. There were liquor stores seriously every two steps, with cute little “Eurodrink” signs and bottles upon bottles of grappa and limoncello and absinthe (but no Jager!). We also saw a ton of groceries each with their own special Nutella snacks: a weekly pack of seven mini Nutella jars labeled for each day of the week, a bottle with a section of orange juice to drink with your Nutella, and a 3 kilo boulder of Nutella with a golden lid for 22 euros. The best grocery shopping took place in a three-aisle, covered farmer’s market, where you can find every possible kind of produce for really cheap (wish I got either those figs or the red bell peppers the size of my head!). The open-air market stretched up the beach, and while we got some nice views of the hills of Ventimiglia in the distance there was little good shopping to be found. Tolu got two jerseys of some of her favorite soccer players and an incredibly cute I-don’t-know-what-to-call-it outfit that looks kind of like overalls but club worthy, we both tried about every nasty-ass type of bitter Fanta the Italians have come up with, and I gorged myself on a huge piece of focaccia before we caught a train home in the rain.

Today was the first day completely open to my wanderlust, and after getting up at a leisurely 10 am I caught a morning train to Cannes. Sadly, after all of my gushing about the amazing white trenchcoat, I came to my senses (or just got enough buyer’s remorse/need for the extra 80 euros) and returned it. It was fun to see Cannes again on a sunny day, with nothing but locals milling around in no kind of film-industry rush. I felt like the heaviest weight had been lifted off me with the 80 euros restored to my credit card; I had stopped by my favorite store, Les Freres Mariages (a tea shop), just to do some window-licking, but when I saw that the tea I liked was 13 euros instead of 18 I bought some, guilt-free!

I got a ticket back to JLP, but I remembered making plans to get lunch with Kaison and Tolu in Nice and decided to just ride a little further than I had paid for. They actually got on the same train with me and we had a good 30-minute ride up the coast, and then we went to *~*KFC*~*! Ah, how wonderful it was to return to civilization (or, at least, capitalism)! No mashed potatoes or biscuits or macaroni & cheese or anything too Southern, but my chicken tenders and fries made a little oasis of Southern-style comfort for me amid all the yelling French teenagers. Oh yeah, we had found Ryan and Jill on the train, and in exchange for my “curry sauce” (spicy French-fry dip) Ryan gave me some extra ketchup, so I really went to town.

Tolu was mad excited to go shopping for cheap and awesome clothes at H & M. It was just a few steps down the strange rue Jean Medecin (lots of pretty old six-story buildings, but under construction in the middle and very cluttered), and when we got there all of the shoppers in the Cote d’Azur had already descended upon the little three-story shop. After a while I knew I wasn’t going to buy any more clothes, so Kaison and I left Tolu to her devices and went two doors down to FNAC. Oh. my. god. Love! Pure and simple, I could live at FNAC. This one was FIVE STORIES and lit with strange red blacklights, achieving the look of a fancy bordello. I am a technology ho, after all, so I drank in all of the plasma TVs and French video games and even the BDs on the top floor. Got to remember though that the quaint, rooftop-café variety of FNAC in Cannes still holds a very special place in my heart, but I truly lost my FNAC virginity today when I *~*bought the Chansons d’Amour soundtrack*~*. Tolu, after rejoining us, got pictures of every stage of my purchase (freaking out in line, saying hi to the cashier, pulling out my money, and getting a receipt), which I will make you look at once I see you in person.

Bill, Laura, and Mandy, as well as Ryan and Jill on their own, met us to trek over to the Virgin Megastore. Pretty, and much lighter, but not as awesome as FNAC. It had a weird, smoky café full of fancy-looking people sitting with their dogs. INDOORS. The French are weird. They were even weirder at Nicetoile, the four-story indoor mall closer to the train station. No shops that were particularly cool (I told Jill later that it was more Gwinnett Place than Lenox Square), but Kaison and I had fun getting fancy soft-serve from a chocolate store, seeing both a monster-sized baby in a carriage and a four-year-old with a pacifier in a home goods store, and looking for strange teapots. The rain eventually drove us out of Nice too, but I will be back tomorrow to see the old city and find the gelato shop with beer-flavored ice cream.

En ville

May 28-30

I’ll probably lump a lot of days together at times, so try to keep up. :\

I’ve definitely not had the fire under my ass to wake up the past few days, but I have enjoyed and looked forward to class every day so far. I get up my usual hour and a half early like I do at UGA, but that means 9:00 am here and I am so loving sleeping in. I think I’ll go to the café across the street every other day for breakfast—the amazing cappuccinos and crowds of UGA kids are quite a draw, but I’m blowing through my spending money! The lady at the café is starting to recognize me, I think, and is always extra friendly when I ask for extra napkins or spoons in French.

Oh, on an extra fun and earth-friendly note, I’ve survived fifteen days so far without drying my hair. When I put my usual leave-in conditioners in it, it turns out fine! I’mma definitely stop drying my hair so much in the States and make Al Gore proud. :P

Nate’s class is intense and laid-back at the same time. We take turns reading the best reviews (gonna brag real quick: all of my reviews have been marked “read”!) about each film and then discussing them as a class. I love hearing how everyone attaches to a different part of the movie—amateur acting, insufferable editing, an innovative directorial technique… Nate also has this amazing way of touching on everything I want to talk about, like what I’m thinking but what I haven’t found words for yet. I hope a bit more experience (OK a lot more) will bring me that skill.

I’m slightly worried about my upcoming reading of my “Death Proof” review. I brought it up in Charley’s class, since I’m going to write about watching my worst movie (Death Proof) and best movie (Diving Bell) in the same day and what that taught me about my tastes in film. Everyone acts really nice when you say you don’t like something; maybe they’re worried they made a mistake in liking it, or maybe they just don’t want to cross you. So I got a few nervous laughs the first time my frustration with Tarantino came up, and I really don’t want to fight people later but you never know what will happen when you have this strong a hate… :P

I’m loving all the writing we’re doing! The stress is definitely on with due dates every other day (and actual class for only two weeks), but I seriously could write ten pages every day. Allison’s first pep talk on good grammar=so awesome! There need to be more teachers who inspire people to write well, which has me leaning toward major #1 (English) again, but…

The film industry seems like so much fun! On Monday we had Nate’s friend and Athens Cine collaborator, James Bond (that seriously is his name and he loves it, drives a hot sports car…), over to visit. He is one of the leading projectionists in the world and designs screens for events like Sony’s private screening of Spider-Man 3 in digital, Chicago’s outdoor movies at the park (his set-up can withstand 100 mph winds in the windy city!), and of course our beloved Cine on West Hancock. I definitely do not know much about film technology, but he was so excited about what he does and explaining it to us that I understood a lot and enjoyed it! Another friend of Nate’s, David Blake, visited today (Wednesday) to tell us about his experience distributing two social awareness documentaries at Cannes. He told us exactly what it has been like for him, but it was so refreshing to hear something encouraging for once, instead “Yeah, you’ll probably be a waiter for awhile unless you know five millionaires.” And he was a really funny Brit, saying things like “I won a bet with my friend and now he has to walk down the Croisette starkers.”

Afternoons at JLP are very relaxed—we have to work around our essay-writing meetings with Charley, but otherwise we have free rein to go wherever we want to once we’ve done our work. The first night here I enjoyed cooking some dinner (pre-cooked raviolis secured at Petit Casino, the only real grocery store/not bodega that was open on the day-after-Sunday holiday) and just reading my travel guide/writing a bit/getting to sleep really early. I hear there was a wild party, but thankfully I didn’t hear it through my earplugs! There’s plenty of fun to be had over the next week and a half, but the Cannes-itis hit me like a TGV that night and I had. to. sleep.

On Tuesday I took Allison’s directions to SPAR, the super-big grocery store beyond the JLP bridge, with Tolu and Amanda and we got crazy groceries for the upcoming weeks. I had been thinking that I’d save money this way, and I definitely can if I live off what I have now (a heap of delicious food), but I have to admit that I love grocery shopping too damned much. I’ll probably go there every other day! After some more mad hot cooking, I trekked off to the beach at sunset with the semi-embarrassing aim to watch some guys throw up. Adam Speas, Jonathan, Chris, and Brian were attempting the “4 Liter Challenge” (the metric scale equivalent of the “Gallon Challenge”, where you try to drink a gallon of milk in an hour without throwing up), and thankfully it went down at the beach. I actually could not watch the guys as they eventually had to vomit into the Med—despite all the hype I did feel a little like I was watching an episode of Jackass and therefore felt kind of dumb. But yeah, it was hella funny. Kaison (who turned 20 that day!) took some mad paparazzi pictures—“nono, throw up over here where I can see you!”—and Freeman took a video that will probably find its way to YouTube. We all (including the contestants) have probably not laughed as hard in our lives.

This afternoon, Samantha, Tolu, Kaison, Jonathan, and Adam and I all went to Grasse to see the perfume factory there. Grasse, the infamous setting of Perfume: Story of a Murderer, is the perfume capital of the world since it can grow so many different and potent types of flowers, and since the flowers don’t bloom until July we skipped the fields in favor of the old factory and museum at the best perfumerie, Fragonard. We followed my ghetto sense of direction up one small hill until we hopped a bus to the centre ville, and we twisted and turned up about six hillside boulevards before the nice bus driver dropped us off right at Fragonard’s door. We ambled through two floors of the museum, gaping at the displays of old perfume bottles and fading labels. When we eventually reached the start of the guided tour, the attendant told us there were no more English language tours, so we decided to just go along with the French tour. There were signs in French and English all along the path through the old factory, and I was shocked by how much of the French tour guide’s presentation I understood.

A few fun tidbits about perfume: it takes two tons of jasmine flowers to distill one liter of jasmine essence! Jasmine does not respond to the high temperatures that other flowers can be distilled at, so they gather its essence by pressing it between layer after layer of glass and using a special technique to rinse the essence off each glass plate! A “nose,” or master perfumer, must be able to recognize over 3000 scents (most humans can readily distinguish only 200), and they have to give up smoking, drinking, and going to sleep too late to keep their olfactory sense in top condition!

Samantha sadly got a headache from all of the scents, but I hope she had fun ambling in the gardens outside while the rest of us spent the rest of regular office hours pawing through the factory shop. I used a 10% off tourist brochure coupon to get one amazing, light scent, the top-selling Belle de Nuit, and another cheap bottle of eau de toilette that smells just like walking through Cannes! Now every time I want to remember my days in the Riviera, I can splash on “Riviera Bleu” and smell like it! :D

After looking through an alleyway of tempting cafes and kitchen shops, we decided to walk back down the hillside to the train. Thankfully we allotted an hour to the task, because I had not realized just how many winding streets the bus had carried us over! I loved having the time to take in the old city, however, and I have an impressive photo album of all of the houses I’d like to own once I make it big as a… film critic? English teacher? Lifelong student (at this rate)?!

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.

My penultimate day at the festival. Oh snap, I used that word correctly!

26 May 2007

I made my last visit to the Majestic Saturday morning only to find that there were no copies of Screen. Again. Do they just decide not to print this stuff if they don’t meet deadline (granted, hard to do when there’s so much going on every day)? I really missed reading their takes on the last few films I saw. Even though they write their reviews based on how marketable the film is to its desired audience, a little too businesslike for my tastes, they kept good tabs on where each competition film stood; I felt a bit adrift without them.

Tickets for Mogari no Mori (“The Mourning Forest,” a Japanese film—hi, Megan!) were easy to come by. I have to admit that, after finally “sleeping in” before catching the 10:12 train, I just wanted to keep sleeping, so… I did. I watched all but the last 15 minutes of the film, which I drifted in and out for (and had some trippy dreams that I hope I didn’t sleeptalk about), and the general consensus was that I didn’t miss much. It was one of those films where I could tell my cultural background didn’t give me what I needed to really appreciate the story. The lingering shots of the forest made me see it in the magical way the old man did, but I obviously found it hard to keep paying attention to long periods of “doing nothing” or at least doing something (like screaming) over and over.

Jill and Ryan stayed for the next film, Samantha went to McDonalds (her mothership), and Kaison and I went to shop a bit. We pawed around a lot of fancy chocolate/wine shops, buying nothing, and I sniffed several perfumes/touched a lot of jewelry that I didn’t buy while he read reviews in Metro, the daily film newspaper. Eventually we made our way to FNAC (my mothership); no signed copies of Persepolis to be found, but a poster did taunt me with the date—four days before I knew I loved the film—that Marjane Satrapi was in the store. Samantha came to meet us on the covered rooftop café while I ate a delicious “Chinese salad” (sautéed chicken, rice, cucumbers, and sprouts on top of some lettuce). As we discussed our possible plans to go to Cap d’Antibes, this well-dressed British guy a table over gave us some directions. Apparently, he’s lived in JLP for 5 years and has some fabulous friends who bring him to yacht parties and casual afternoons with stars like Leo DiCaprio and Bono. I was more than startled to hear that he’s never seen a film at the Palais, but he was similarly shocked that we knew of none of the party places he goes to. His friend, a more down-to-earth visiting Brit, said “Cheerio!” when they left.

We tried a second time to get into Pirates of the Caribbean at the Arcades theatre in Cannes after a bit of slumming around JLP. Kaison, Tolu, and I caught a later train back to Cannes and went to Monoprix for candy before meeting up with Bill, Mandy, and Laura, who said that the theatre was closed because of a black-tie premiere there. I’ve gotten used to disappointment at the festival, so it didn’t bug me much, but we weren’t sure we could make another evening of just wandering around old Cannes. Thankfully, Adam called to say that he and about 7 others were in the theatre; the uppity guards for the premiere must have mislead Laura because of language issues, or they were just being jerks. I coughed up 8 euro and wandered up some typically French, narrow stairs into a theatre the size of two dorm rooms. The screen was small, taking up only the upper half of a smaller side of the rectangular room, and the restrooms peeked from a small entryway at the side of the screen—very glad I didn’t have to use them and thus be seen by the whole theatre for a restroom run. It was no Grand Theatre Lumiere, but it was pretty fun to see an English-language movie in a typical French theatre. I didn’t hate the movie as much as some people did, but it kind of got on my nerves how, if there was anything campy that they could do with the characters, they took it to the extreme. I’ll respect Disney’s wishes for early reviewers and not spoil the plot for you. But I think if you like Pirates you’ll enjoy some of the in-jokes, Johnny’s typically flawless performance, and all of the crazy action scenes (especially on your bigger American movie screens).

We had a brush with the law while we sat for half and hour on the train back to JLP. Police were everywhere outside of our car, about six of them present around a man they had handcuffed. Everyone thought this was funny, and Kaison wanted a keepsake so he took a photo. Immediately after the flash all of the cops pointed up at our car, and one of the hugest guys I’ve ever seen actually comes into the car, looks at Kaison and says “Votre appareil-photo” like he’s going to confiscate it. Kaison did some quick talking and showed him how the picture didn’t even turn out (it just got the reflection of my arm in the window), and he left just before I couldn’t hold in my nervous laughter any longer. So that’s how we learned not to mess with French cops, even if they don’t pack heat: they’re worried they’re not photogenic.

The day I met Martin Scorsese

Just taking a break before we go to see Pirates of the Caribbean (in English) at one of the theatres in Cannes! Yay, a movie that isn't about abortions or bestiality!

Lauren

24 May 2007

On the ninth day of the festival, I think it finally hit me how big a deal this thing is.

It took much longer than usual to hook for tickets for Ocean’s Thirteen, the big movie out of competition in the festival, in the morning. Bill, Laura, Mandy, and I all got tickets, but Samantha couldn’t find one (this proved to be a good thing for her later). I had a numbered corbeille seat, front and center in the balcony, and I sat surrounded by tons of big French executives who were cracking in-jokes and e-mailing deals over their Blackberry phones. I won’t spoil any of the movie for anyone, but I have to say it was hilarious! More so than the first two, but still with all of the high-tech, “gotcha!” action. I might have been extra excited because I was one of the first 2,000 regular audience members to see the film everyone in the U.S. wants to see this summer—how weird and amazing was that?!

When we walked out of the Lumiere, I heard screaming fans over by the red carpet, but I walked by pretty fast to get my trade mags and use the restroom at the Majestic (I do this so many times a day that the guards all know me and don’t even bother to check my bags, whereas for some reason they don’t even let some of the other Cinephiles in). I walked back to gather with the UGA group on the grass, and girls and guys alike were going insane: the cast of Entourage was rehearsing for the episode they’d be shooting at the Ocean’s Thirteen evening premiere, and most of the people I know got pictures with them! I don’t watch the show (yet), so I didn’t mind missing the rehearsal, but just thinking about how big this festival is in the entertainment world, that a popular TV show would film here and millions of viewers would wish they were here...

Most surreal moment of the day, however, was our meeting with Martin Scorsese. Yes, THE Martin Scorsese talked to, among others, my class at his directing master class in the Debussy theatre. We had gathered on the grass to get our VIP tickets for the event, and it felt so great to walk right up the blue carpet instead of waiting in line for the cheap seats. Tolu, Laura, Bill, and I sat four rows back from the stage. While we were waiting, one kid whispered to his friend “Hey, I think that’s Quentin Tarantino,” and then an entire section of cameras started aiming a little ways beyond my head. I got a little testy again at how much everyone was falling all over themselves for this guy (and how much he was lapping it up); it was too weird that we were in the same room, and even though I wasn’t close enough to spit on him I was satisfied that he was about to learn from a really good filmmaker.

I kept coming in and out of thought during Scorsese’s talk. We watched clips from six of his films (now I know where to start, since The Departed was *gasp* my first Scorsese film), and how much he still remembered about all of the scenes’ details amazed me. He has it down to a science, but it comes so naturally to him after all his years of loving and working in film—very interesting to see in action. He cracked a lot of jokes and everyone on the trip wanted him to be their grandpa. And the last few minutes he talked about the world cinema foundation he’s starting via Cannes to preserve and archive films all over the world like he’s done in America; he said we’re responsible for making sure future generations get to experience cinema (and the world it reflects), which is a weighty yet intriguing challenge.

The rest of the afternoon was a blur after the excitement of seeing Martin Scorsese. Lots of kids went to the red carpet for the Ocean’s premiere, which I knew would be a mob scene (some girls got pushed over in the mad rush to reach out to Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, and George Clooney!). Kaison and I schemed to go to one more premiere later that night, the Russian competition film Alexandra, which turned out to be a good and bad experience. We actually got to see all the stars in a much less extreme atmosphere; they walked down the red carpet again after the premiere (which is sort of uncommon, so no big crowd had gathered), and I didn’t get any pics but definitely saw all of the guys and Angelina Jolie as well, in her beautiful yellow dress. Alexandra ended up being incredibly slow, with a beautiful, swelling score but no action to accompany it, and after no amazing “Russian grandma saves the day on the battlefield” moments like the synopsis seemed to promise we left early to catch the train. Which sat in the station for an hour late for God knows what reason. We had a jolly time reminiscing about all of the American TV shows we like to watch, but when we got back at 1 I died only to revive at 7 to finish two more film reviews.

25 May 2007

Got into the 11:30 screening “We Own the Night” along with Chris, Kaison, and Jonathan, but not before I got yet another nutella banana panini, or should I say “nutella banini” per my tired but creative misspeaking at the snack bar. Oh my gosh they’re good. I fully plan on investing in a panini press in the U.S. for the sole purpose of making baninis. Despite almost everyone else’s opinion, I had fun with “We Own the Night.” Anything with Mark Wahlberg is bound to rock my socks off, and he and Joaquin Phoenix make an interesting pair of good/bad brothers whose conception of family changes when their police family gets them into a drug war. My favorite scene had to be the car chase in the rain; there was no goofy music playing to up the tension, only the sound of the windshield wipers and skidding cars. It really looked and felt as chaotic and scary as it would be if you got into a multiple-car gunfight in real life.

“Une Vieille Maitresse,” the first period piece by “the French princess of erotica” Catherine Breillat, was playing right after “We Own the Night,” and tickets were curiously easy to come by. We assume it’s because most of the market people have picked up and shipped out, but we seriously were half of the way to our usual corner when a lady came up behind me and asked if I needed tickets. People in line were holding extra tickets out for anyone to take. We got even better balcony seats than we did for the first film (good because I left my glasses at the apartment and needed to be close to be able to read the subtitles), and I liked this movie even more than the previous one. The story was so strange, about a libertine who has decided to settle down and leave his lover of 10 years only to cross her path again on his honeymoon; he tells his wife’s grandmother the full story of his affair to gain her confidence, and even though it seems like he and “the old mistress” hate each other he eventually leaves his wife for her again. The film was as sexy as you’d expect from Breillat, but all the sex scenes worked for the complex characters and beautiful costuming/landscapes. It’s certainly not the Palme d’Or winner, but it was very enjoyable to watch.

We came back to JLP briefly to change, but then the plan was to go back to Cannes to watch Pirates of the Caribbean at one of the traditional movie theatres there. We talked to the tourist agency and even found the theatre online and felt secure in the movie time and its being in English, however another late train ride and the following sprint down the Rue d’Antibes proved futile when the ticket takers said the film started Saturday. We pottered around for awhile, trying to think of things to do over some amazing ice cream, and eventually we just started walking toward old Cannes. The streets became narrower and steeper and made of cobblestones, and cute local art stores dotted our chosen boulevard of restaurant after restaurant. We’re going to have to go back, because I want to eat a real, full meal again and the menus at all of these places looked great. Adam led us up some crazy stairs between apartment buildings to the church on the top of the hill, and we were treated to the most breathtaking view of the city. On one side we could look all the way past the Palais and down the row of hotels on the Croisette, and on the other side streetlights winked from hills leading toward mountains beyond a bay. I got a few pictures of us climbing the church walls (and almost falling three stories out of holes in the walls), but eventually it began to rain, and we stared longing at all of the restaurants as we jogged toward the train station.

So many films, so little time

Shorter entries for these next two days. In all of the chaos of getting the most out of the last few days of the festival, I have a) not had time to write (at least not anything but reviews for class) and 2) forgotten some of the smaller anecdotes about my days. The films, as always, are the most important part, and you’ve probably seen that my days follow generally the same patterns anyway: wake up, eat breakfast in/not in a café, take the train that’s running late…

Lauren

22 May 2007

I saw one of the worst and one of the best films of my life on my mother’s birthday. I got up not too early and added a bowl of half-eaten granola to the stack of dirty dishes in our sink before I headed to Cannes to see Death Proof. I know, “Why on earth would you do that? You HATE Quentin Tarantino!” I’ve always thought it’s important to know what you’re talking about, especially if you’re disagreeing with it, and I figured I might have some fun seeing the longer version of Death Proof before the obnoxious premiere later that night. And I hadn’t researched my options well enough to know if there was anything better to do that morning.

About the best I can say for the film is that it had a bitchin’ soundtrack. There’s never been any doubt for me that Tarantino has some talent behind the camera. The shots he creates can be gorgeous, and if he is ripping off other people’s material (which he is) he usually does it in a way that’s very entertaining. I did like Kill Bill, and I at least thought that Sam Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction was hilarious. But, for me, Death Proof could not do enough tricks to interest me in a dead story. All the violence and fast-talking that made his other films look edgy and fun were pointless with two sets of nearly identical, vapid characters and no payoff in the plot department. And I know that grindhouse films never had good plots or complex characters. That argument in Tarantino’s defense does not work for me. He has somehow conned most of my generation, and even the Cannes Film Festival for crying out loud, into thinking he’s an auteur of our times, a “good filmmaker.” He owes them a little more than a glammed-up piece of garbage. His saying that grindhouse films, and other sorts of admittedly fun trash, are “classics” is making people have bad taste, end of story.

Ugh! I had to cheer myself up with a bit of shopping before I came back to JLP to write a review. I wish I could talk about one of the fun stores I went in, but I got my sister a present there and it would totally give away my brilliant gift-getting skills! I did take another trip to FNAC, my new favorite place because of its relatively cheap, uncrowded café on the roof, and seeing the comic book of Persepolis on the shelf reminded me that I needed to see the film the next day. I also browsed through almost all of the little alleyways between the Palais and the Miramar, the Croisette and the train station—basically all of Cannes where the festival is taking place. BTW there aren’t a million Sephora stores like I thought. I think there are only two that take up a whole building floor apiece and have entries on two streets.

I cleaned up at my second-favorite begging corner near the merry-go-round and got into the premiere of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly with Samantha. We watched the red carpet scene on the big screen in the theater (air conditioning! a girl’s—and sweaty Frenchmen’s—best friend in the rising Mediterranean temps). The cast and director’s team released boxes and boxes of orange and blue butterflies before they came in the theater, and after one of the butterflies landed on an actress’s eyelash and refused to get off for a few minutes the director scooped it up and brought it inside, to the horror of the jumpy Lumiere usherettes. I felt sick for the first quarter of the movie because it was filmed from the main character’s perspective (if you haven’t heard about the film, it’s based on the book former Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote by blinking one eye, the only part of him not paralyzed by a stroke he had at age 42). Soon, as “Jean-Do” got used to his new lifestyle and decided to free himself from his “locked-in syndrome” through his imagination, the film expanded to encompass his memories and his beautiful perspective on the landscape around his hospital. Jean-Do’s perseverance alone was staggering, but the optimism of his therapists and stenographer, and especially the grief of his 92-year-old father, had me misty-eyed throughout the movie. I still cannot imagine what the incident was like for Jean-Do and his family, but the movie made me feel like I had lived it to the greatest extent that it could. The ovation afterwards lasted over 10 minutes, and even though my hands went numb I kept clapping louder and louder. Wonderful, wonderful movie that I hope will win the Palme d’Or and that everyone back in the States will get to see.

23 May 2007

Samantha and I had kept the plan under wraps, but we were going to go to Cap d’Antibes to snoop around the posh Hotel du Cap and hopefully see the diving board into the ocean, the poodle graveyard, and stars staying there (Brangelina and the cast of Ocean’s Thirteen, to name a few). However, I woke up feeling really sick! I took a very atypical nap an hour after I waking up, and after she’d walked a quarter of the way to the Cap and back we went into Cannes to get some McDonalds and get to begging for tickets.

I made a killing at my typical corner at the Palais when I hooked for tickets to the 4:00 pm show of Persepolis. You know how prostitutes in movies always have their own “turf” and get ticked when other people invade it? That’s me and my shaded corbeille/orchestra tent corner and all of the old French people who try to get tickets there without signs as cute as mine. I got my first ticket within ten minutes (record time!), and even though they usually seem to smell the first ticket on you and refuse to give you another one for awhile I snagged one for Chris as well. Samantha had procured one for herself at her own spot, and we got in with plenty of time to find center seats at the edge of the balcony for a perfect view of the only animated film in competition.

Persepolis has gotten a bit of press recently because Iran did not want Cannes to screen it. It’s about Paris-based author Marjane Satrapi’s experiences growing up in/leaving/returning to Iran in the 1970s and ‘80s, during all of the upheaval with the shah of Iran. Basically, Iran went from being relatively Westernized under an oppressive ruler to suddenly very religious (with women having to wear veils and everything) under an even more oppressive revolutionary regime. There was a lot of suffering, and while the film didn’t mince words on that front it was tempered by Satrapi’s cute sense of humor. The film perfectly matches up with her original comic book, and the young Marjane in the film was adorable! There was just as big of an ovation for this as there was for Diving Bell, and it was really touching to see how moved Satrapi was. It must be a profound thing to put your life before so many people and to have them embrace you like that. One of the voice actresses stuffed a jasmine flower down her shirt (an in-joke from the movie that I’ll let you enjoy when you see the film), and everyone was waving and shouting and reaching out to pat her on the back as she finally left the theater.

We went back to JLP to write some more and eat food that didn’t cost as much as all the designer clothes on the Croisette, but about half of the group went back for the movie on the beach. It was so nice and warm for most of the evening, but I stole a blanket anyway (ha!). We got there with time to spare and made a full UGA row, taking turns with each others’ passes to go out for food at the snack bar. The film was Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, a strange but very cool, semi-autobiographic film. Even though it didn’t have the title song in it to jazz it up a bit, I could see why it won the Palme d’Or. But with all of these weird choices showing up as past winners on the screen on the beach, what weird film will take the prize this year?