IT IS a bacchanalian orgy of excess – an excess of money, alcohol and fine, rich cuisine, if not of taste or sleep. It is a potent mix. I know, I went on several occasions for The Scotsman.
But when the corpses are mounting in Asia and more and more families in Britain are finding themselves drowning beneath mountains of unpaid bills, is there still an appetite for news and gossip from the Cannes Film Festival? Is Cannes a insensitive i
rrelevance?
Yes and yes. It is an insensitive irrelevance. But there is a huge appetite for every titbit, every paparazzi picture of B-list celebrities… provided, of course, that the news and the pictures are of Hollywood films and film stars (or maybe British ones).
The festival began yesterday, but will kick into overdrive on Sunday with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the first new instalment in Steven Spielberg and George Lucas's franchise for almost 20 years.
The world is desperate to know whether Harrison Ford can still cut the mustard as an action adventurer, still crack the whip, while maintaining a grip on the bus pass at the same time. The film opens worldwide within days of the Cannes premiere.
Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansson, Penélope Cruz and Benicio del Toro are also expected to make an appearance on the red carpet during the festival.
That is one version of Cannes – big stars, big premieres, big parties, big money. But there are others.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is being shown as part of the official festival, though in the past Hollywood studios have simply used Cannes as a launch pad for films, organising their own screenings and parties, sometimes for films that are not even complete.
Beyond the official festival, there is the market where anyone can book space and try to sell their wares. The Scottish political period drama/thriller Stone of Destiny is screening in the market and Pathé is showing buyers advance footage from The Illusionist, the film that French animator Sylvain Chomet is currently making at his studios in Edinburgh.
Stars come to promote films that have not even begun filming, sometimes will never begin filming. They are there to raise awareness among the public and possible backers. And the public lap it up.
But it is not all glitz and glamour. Rubbing shoulders with Indy in the official line-up is Lorna's Silence, a film about an Albanian woman who enters an arranged marriage in order to become Belgian. It may be brilliant, but it will not be pushing Indy off the front pages.
Last year the top prize, the Palme d'Or, went to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a film about an illegal abortion in Romania in the 1980s. It was released in the UK in January by a tiny distributor called Artificial Eye, which has long specialised in difficult foreign films. It grossed so little that the figures do not appear on the Internet Movie Database.
Cannes provides a platform for dozens of hard, realist dramas, providing an insight into other cultures, their difficulties and their tragedies. The critics rave about them. But the public would much rather look at a photograph of Angelina Jolie and what she is wearing than sit through a film about abortion in Romania in the 1980s, no matter how good it is.
The public helps to maintain the popular image of Cannes as one of glamour, celebrity and excess, rather than one of low-budget, foreign- language movies that reflect and challenge the world we live in.
When it comes to watching the films in the cinema, the public vote with their feet, and they have repeatedly shown they do not want reality, whether it is the reality of some east European genius or a film-maker nearer home, such as Ken Loach or Scotland's Lynne Ramsay. She was lauded in Cannes in 1999 for Ratcatcher, but missing in action since Morvern Callar underperformed at the box office six years ago.
Cinema attendance boomed during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when thousands were out of work, pleading with their buddies to spare a dime they could spend on entry to the latest, lavish, musical spectacular from Busby Berkeley.
The Berkeley films gloried in their vulgar irrelevance, but that was what audiences loved about them. They took their minds off empty bellies and empty days and provided an avenue of escape from reality.
The tougher the times, the greater the appetite for escapism and fantasy and glamour. Films like Indiana Jones – and the endless Hollywood rom-coms and comic-book adaptations – provide a vehicle for escape, in much the same way Busby Berkeley did in the 1930s. Consider the current release Made of Honour and a heroine who is torn between a fabulously rich American and a fabulously rich Scottish aristocrat. Ken Loach this ain't.
We live in a society obsessed by celebrity, but the stars were as big in the 1930s, perhaps bigger. The difference is that their personal lives were not subjected to quite the same scrutiny.
The public could look at them in envy and then stitch their own private fantasies onto the aura of mystique that shrouded their particular glamour.
The mystique has gone, but the glamour remains, albeit a little tarnished in many cases.
And the envy remains the same, as evinced by the popularity of the lottery, reality shows and the dream that one day the number will come up, the film producer will walk into the drug store and issue an invitation to an audition, or one of those spectacular yachts in the bay.
Cannes is like that, a dream, a nightmare, a fantasy that can mean whatever you want it to mean.
It is as relevant or as irrelevant today as it ever was.
The full article contains 985 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
