Pink badge girl meets the good, the bad and the weird

by Grainne Harrington

Article published on the 2008-05-15 Latest update 2008-05-22 08:42 TU

Wednesday, 14 May

(From L) French actor and MC Edouard Baer, documentary filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, US actor/director and President of the jury Sean Penn and the members of the jury - Israeli-US actress Natalie Portman, Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron, French actress Jeanne Balibar, Romanian born actress Alexandra Maria Lara, Italian actor and director Sergio Castellitto, Iranian author and director Marjane Satrapi, French director Rachid Bouchareb and Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul attend the opening ceremony of the 61st edition of the Cannes Film Festival
(Photo : AFP)

The eight o’clock Paris-Nice was packed with people who looked too smart to be going on holiday. Way too cool, way too busy.

My first impression of Cannes is a train station with too many people. Ten thousand people seem to have boarded this train, and they’re all getting off at Cannes.

It takes ten hot, loud minutes to get out of the door of the tiny station. Another hour to get a taxi.

Cannes taxi drivers are not impressed by movie types. It’s lunchtime and they’re at lunch. Suddenly at 2 pm there's rush of cabs and I finally get to my hotel in the quiet hills above Cannes.

In Festival terms, today is a quiet day. The real stuff starts tomorrow - today is all about ceremony. In other words, showing off. On the way to the famous Croisette, the heart of the festival, I notice that the back streets of Cannes are fairly quiet.

The glossy boutiques are entirely empty, shop assistants stand at the doors looking bored. The restaurants, however, are packed to the very edge of every sunny terrace. The festival-goers have arrived, and they are very, very hungry.

On the Croisette, there’s a feeling something is about to happen. The huge hotels which look out into the Bay of Cannes are plastered with enormous movie posters, promising to make you laugh or to scare the life out of you.

I bumped into a friend on the train on the way down, a jaded festival regular. He looked tired already.

“Cannes is every cliché in the world packed into a square mile,” he told me. Looking around the Croisette,

I can see what he means. Men in dark glasses guard every hotel entrance, keeping the plebs out. Camera crews rush around, speaking every language in the world. There’s an odd prevalence of unfeasibly tall, ridiculously beautiful women. And men who say "Hey, baby!" to women who walk past.

Out in the bay, yachts the size of small towns sulk ominously, reminding you that you are definitely not, and never will be, really, truly, rich. The beachfront is lined with ice-cream parlours selling a scoop of vanilla for the price of a glass of champagne.

On the beach, I’m surprised to see sunbathers with their backs to all of the action, a tan and a chapter of a novel more important than the swirl going on behind them.

So blasé! They must actually live here.

But residents seem to be outnumbered already by at least ten to one.

You can’t move without a badge here. Press badges are colour-coded according to how many times you’ve been to the festival, from pink to gold.

My badge is pink - for festival virgins. I’ve never been here before - and now everyone knows it. They really know how to make you feel insignificant here.

At the opening ceremony, this year's jury president Sean Penn looks tense. There are speeches and applause.

And then the best bit: a montage of the films being shown here over the next ten days. I want to see them all: Clint Eastwood’s The Changeling - the one everyone’s talking about - a film about a child taken from his mother and replaced with another boy. Steven Soderbergh’s Che Guevara biopic, with Benicio del Toro looking frighteningly like the iconic pictures of el Che. My Magic, a film from Singapore about a magician. An animated film about an Israeli soldier who fought in the Lebanon war in the 1980s. A Korean film called the Good, the Bad and the Weird, which deserves a prize just for the title. And the big commercial blockbuster of this year’s festival: Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones 4.

They play the theme music, and I am nine years old again. I can’t stop myself smiling. Time to go to the movies…