There are certain things you should probably know about the newspaper coverage of the festival. There are reasons behind the weird hazy slightly drunken tone of the coverage. It's not just the density of beauty, money and fame.
Wine is sometimes involved, because, after all, it's cheaper than chewing gum in France, and expense account lunches encourage indulgence. More important is the stunning over-lit brightness to the setting (it was at Cannes that a critic told me his theory of the strangeness of all Stanley Kubrick films - over-lighting.) The Mediterranean sun bouncing off the beige walls and red tiled roofs of the buildings stacked up the hillsides, the sparkling sea with white yachts floating on the water to the south, the low-lying purple mountains to the northwest. As in many resorts, you end up feeling like the strange dull blob in the corner of a perfect living postcard.
Then there is the massive sense of jet lag for most of the 3,000 visiting press from abroad, and for a lot of us from the northern climes a release from the coma of winter. French sexuality is public and jarringly direct: French men stare; French woman dress to be stared at.
Finally, there is the nature of the actual film festival, which is both pompously serious in its formality and ridiculous in its vulgarity. Uniformed guards are everywhere keeping the common folk from the shrine of cinema known as the Palais.
At the same time, the 20-year-old would-be starlets who have somehow found access to the screenings stand on the red carpet indulge in something close to clothed pornography for the cameras: They swirl, they throw back their heads, their hands rove over their bodies pushing the fabric even closer to their skin. If they're especially hot and very lucky, they may just end up on the cover of a publication and get a career.
Finally, it's a chance to be around your idols and colleagues. Crazy as it may seem, for many film critics, their idols aren't Sharon Stone or Quentin Tarantino, but other film writers. Cannes brings together the best in the business. It's intriguing to have the chance to meet Jim Hoberman of The Village Voice or Todd McCarthy of Variety, critics who, in their way, are contributing to the history of film criticism.
Outside of the daily grind of reviewing the latest Hollywood product, there is a chance to talk about film and learn, not just from the veterans you may have read for years, but younger broadly knowledgeable writers such as Mark Peranson of the Canadian publication Cinemascope or Jason Anderson from Toronto's Eye magazine.
It is almost impossible to convince anyone back at home that this is actually work, but of course, the festival is that too. Ten days straight, from 8:30 a.m. to midnight often, juggling mind-boggling schedules of screenings, press conferences, and finding time to file a story a day back to the paper. (Not to mention taking a shower: By the end of the festival you become all too aware of your colleagues who have eliminated time-consuming daily ablutions.)
Then there are the inevitable technological snafus: Phones don't work, computers don't work, and you find yourself begging in bad French with the salesman at the local version of Radio Shack for the adaptor that will turn your life from despair to glory before that afternoon's deadline.
Just like back home, about 90 per cent of the movies are unimpressive, even though they have been chosen, apparently, from the best the world has to offer. So far this week, we've seen seven films (I've seen five, including the four in the official competition and the surprisingly good new British-set Woody Allen movie, Match Point). On Friday morning, we saw the new Atom Egoyan film, based on the book, Where The Truth Lies by Rupert Holmes.
Holmes has an intriguing biography. He was a musical teen whiz kid who sang all the parts for an imaginary harmony group in the late sixties on Warner Bros. record label. He recorded a song, with the intention of getting banned and therefore usually popular, called Timothy, around 1970. It was about teenaged cannibalism in a mineshaft. His plan succeeded and the record was both reviled and became a huge hit. Later, he wrote for Barbra Streisand and Barry Manilow ( The Pina Colada Song, which, if you've ever got past the Barry Manilow thing, is actually a clever song about an unhappily married couple who accidentally answer each other's ad in the personal columns).
Holmes has always showed a penchant for narrative as well as music. He created the seventies Broadway hit, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, based on the Dickens novel. And then, a couple of years ago, he wrote a novel, about a young journalist trying to find out the story behind the break-up of a fifties television act (à la Martin and Lewis) and a nasty secret involving a young prostitute who ended up dead.
So far the competition has been fairly weak. The opening film, French director Dominik Moll's Lemming, starts off as a sharp comedy about the illusion of civility represented by the bourgeois life. A young model couple moves to a new suburb; the boss is invited over to dinner. But bad things happen. An apparently dead rodent is found blocking up the sink. Then the boss and his wife arrive late and she throws a glass of wine at her husband and refuses to take her sunglasses off at the table. A great start, but then the movie degenerates into a conventional thriller.
Kilometer Zero, from Iraq, is the story of a Kurd forced into the Iraq army in 1988, to fight against Iran. He is forced to accompany an Arab driver across the country with the corpse of a dead soldier (the road-movie-with-corpse has become an international cliché). A predictable mixture of black comedy and pathos follow although the film offered one major surprise: A film about Iraq that treats the American invasion, not as a catastrophe, but as a great liberation.
Bashing, from Japan's Kobayashi Masahiro, is a drama based on real-life events: Japanese civilians who were kidnapped in Iraq and subsequently released were socially shunned when they returned home. The film follows the life of one woman, who becomes increasingly convinced that she would be better off in the war-zone of Iraq than being hated at home. Unfortunately, the film never really explains why she is ostracized so brutally.
Two years ago, U.S. director Gus van Sant, who took the Palme d'Or for his film Elephant, a dramatic reconstruction of the Columbine high school massacre. This year he offers Last Days, obviously, if loosely, based on the last days of suicidal rock star Kurt Cobain. Using long, distant takes, a score that ranges from Lou Reed to the sounds of church bells, the film serves as a kind of simulation of the rock star's alienation fragmented mental state. Experimental, brooding and strange, Last Days is one of those films so out there it can earn either adulation or approbation. Personally, I'm on the fence: I was fascinated by what Van Sant is trying to do, but the experience of the film makes my brain tired.
The weekend is stacked up: Press conferences for the new Star Wars movie, which gets its worldwide launch here, and Basic Instinct 2, which will try to find a new way to shock us. David Cronenberg's A History of Violence gets its premiere on Monday, with Lars von Trier's Mandalay (part two of his American trilogy following Dogville) and the new Jim Jarmusch film, Broken Blossoms, with Bill Murray, Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange and Tilda Swinton, on Tuesday.
Tuesday, the seventh of the 12 days of Cannes, is, traditionally, is the day of the emotional meltdowns, when the stress, crowds, lack of sleep and hype become overwhelming. Strong men have panic attacks and brave women shut off their cell phones and begin to sob.
This may sound like exaggeration, but it is not. The Tuesday slump is a well-known phenomenon, a little like the moment at a party where the host and hostess begin to fight and everyone just wants to go home.
Then, suddenly, it is Wednesday and the end is in sight. The critics begin betting which film will win which award, and everyone starts preparing their goodbyes. You realize you're going to miss the excitement, even though you're looking forward to going back to a place where the lighting is a little less glaring and the daily drama a little more subdued.
Liam Lacey