I was hoping to camp outside of Cannes just over the summit of the final mountain ridge I had to cross on Saturday night and speed down Sunday morning arriving by nine a.m. to pick up the goodies, but I fell twenty miles short of my goal and didn’t make it until noon. But it didn’t matter, as even though I was able to grab my credentials, the bags weren’t being distributed until the next day, requiring a return visit to the accreditation office. Getting the credentials earlier speeded up the process, but not much.
My pass was printed out by a machine in a kiosk right along the harbor. There was no wait, but I had my first encounter with the ubiquitous ever-zealous festival security that can be a headache when I set down my handlebar bag to pull out my iPad to retrieve the special number I had been sent for my early processing. A guard pounced on me, strongly reprimanding me for having an unattended bag. When he left, the young woman overseeing the operation apologized for his behavior and said she would speak to him about it.
When I finally got the program first thing Monday morning there was the exciting news that there were five screenings that day, an unexpected bonus. Ordinarily the movies didn’t start until the next day. Three of the screenings though were trailers and one was by invitation only. It was just as well that there was only one movie to tempt me, as whatever time I spent watching a movie was time I needed to dissect the program.
The movie was a French comedy that wasn’t scheduled to open until October. It was shown at two p.m., just when I needed a break from reading the synopses of dozens of movies. “Play” was a perfect hors d’oeuvre, just the type of movie I search for in the market that holds up a mirror to French society, giving me added insight into my surroundings for the next couple of months. It was the compilation of twenty-five years of videos that a fourteen year old starred shooting of his life when he was given a video camera. He’d finally decided to try to reduce the hundreds of hours of video he had shot well into his marriage into a movie. He follows his life from an awkward teen into awkward adulthood. It doesn’t begin very auspiciously, but it actually works.
About half the French films I’ll see will have a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower. This one did not but it did refer to it. One of the teenager’s friends boasts to him that a Dutch girl he claims to have seduced when they were on a trip to Barcelona was impressed with the size of his penis and called it the Eiffel Tower.
Having taken time for a movie I fell thirty pages short of reading all 152 pages of the one paragraph descriptions of all the movies before they started playing. I had only come upon one movie on bicycling so far, but three others included a mention of cycling. One referred to a woman killed while riding her bike. Another mentioned kids riding BMXs and the last was an Un Certain Regard film, an American comedy called “The Climb,” that pictured two guys on bikes in the mountains. The actual biking movie was a Spanish animated featured called “Bikes” and it was playing only once and that was today. It would be my fourth movie of the day.
I could have begun the day with a film about Little League baseball, but I opted for a French film starring Marion Cotillard—“Little White Lies.” She is one of a group of ten relatives and friends who surprise a big-time Parisian restaurant owner at his getaway home on the Atlantic coast for his 60th birthday. He’s not happy to see them at all, as he has been estranged from them and is greatly depressed over losing his restaurant, which none of them know about, not even his girl friend. All of them have their torments. There is a lot of arguing over past issues. Cotillard is the most volatile of the lot. The script rampages from one unpleasant scene to another, interrupted by some reconciliation and play, including Cotillard and two others jumping out of a plane and the two gay guys going off on a bike ride on electric-assist fat-tired bikes. This was a consummate French relationship movie that manages a happy ending.
I had a slight breather with my next film, “Abe,” a Brazilian production about a 12-year old boy by the name of Abe whose mother is a Jew and father an Arab. It takes place in New York City. The rival strong-willed relatives both want him to embrace their religion and culture. The Brazilian connection is a black Brazilian who runs a food stand that Abe takes an interest in, as he has a fascination with and talent for cooking. He ends up working for the Brazilian unknown to his parents. There is lots of arguing along with marital strife in this movie too, but it is more heartwarming than heartrending.
It was back to French fare featuring another French icon, Isabelle Huppert, in “Pure as Snow,” directed by the lone director of note among the day’s films—Anne Fontaine. Huppert owns a luxury hotel and is incensed when her boy friend takes an interest in a ravishingly beautiful young woman on her staff, so Huppert arranges for her to disappear. The movie momentarily lapses into a horror movie when the young woman finds herself running for her life in a forest in the mountains and then wakes up in bed with a seedy young man hovering over her. She turns into a nymphomaniac seducing man after man in the small village she turned up in. It looked as if Huppert was just going to have a cameo in the movie, but half an hour later she turns up at this village hoping to finish off the job that the person she hired failed to do. This joins “Elle” as one of the lesser role choices that Huppert has chosen. If this movie had been directed by a man, rather than a woman, it would be savaged by feminists.
I was more than ready for “Bikes” after this. The town of Spokesville is a cyclist’s dream, inhabited solely by bikes, and fully ornamented with bike parts—chains adorning roofs and earrings, arches of handlebars and chainrings, pyramids of freewheels and other adornments. Each bike has a talking face, some with mustaches formed by bike parts that have a bend to them. There is no need for bike racks because bikes, being the sole beings in this town, go in and out of buildings. The tranquility of the town is upset when bankers pushing gas-powered bikes convince just about everyone to convert to putting engines on their bikes. This leads to a rebellion by those unwilling to accept the noise and pollution they create. And good wins out.
I ended the day with two more French films. France’s leading television book critic loses his job when he dares to question that a deceased small-town baker was the author of a best-selling book published after his death in “The Mystery of Henry Pick.” The critic goes to the small town in Brittany where he lived to get to the bottom of the mystery. He goes to its library that has a special room of rejected manuscripts where the book was found the year before. That leads to a local book club and back to Paris with the daughter of the baker. Their arrival in Paris gives the festival’s first grand image of the Eiffel Tower. As with the other three French movies so far, the dialogue is fast and furious and the characters all creditable French prototypes—solid, cinema fare, not necessarily worth seeking out, but enjoyable if one is in the mood.
The final film, “The Pink Thief,” was in a different class. It was semi-slapstick for the Chinese Market about a young Chinese woman arriving in Paris to marry her French boyfriend. The dialogue alternates between Chinese and French and the subtitles too, so I had to rely on my limited French. The girl is flighty and flakey as she initially frolics about Paris pulling her red suitcase photographing and videoing all the sites of Paris beginning with the Eiffel Tower, which is interjected multiple times. It takes its title from an equally goofy guy in a pink suit who periodically steals one of three small paper bags she is carrying, each with a role of toilet paper as a ruse to the pickpockets she fears, so they’ll simply grab one of those bags rather than something more valuable. I stuck with this movie nearly to the end as I had to wait for Ralph to get back to our apartment before me as he had our lone key.
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