The first time I attended the Cannes Film Festival, I stayed at the Martinez, one of the grand hotels that line the Croisette, the palm-lined boulevard that runs along the sea. On opening day, I was heading off to a screening and, after sharing an elevator with Mickey Rourke, made my way through the Art Deco lobby. When the front door swung open, I saw hundreds of fans and photographers straining against guard ropes, desperate to catch a glimpse of someone famous—anyone.
“Dudley! Dudley!” a voice cried, and the crowd suddenly began to roar.
But as I stepped from the shadows into the sunlight, the cheers melted into a long, heavy sigh. Smiles turned to glares. Paparazzi lowered their cameras. And I stood there feeling like a fool. They hated me for not being Dudley Moore.
In a way, I could understand their disappointment. Ever since the festival began, in 1946, Cannes has been a shrine to stardom. Merely to say the name is to call up a vanished world that we forever imagine in radiant black-and-white visions of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock and Grace Kelly (who met Prince Rainier here in 1955), Marlon Brando and Brigitte Bardot, back when they were as dangerously sexy as lions on the veld. Yet even in our age of watery digital video, when Johnny Depp prefers torn T-shirts to tenue de soirée, Cannes shimmers with inescapable glamour. Limos cruise the Croisette like sharks, flashbulbs turn the city into a blizzard of exploding white light, happy mobs stand on the sidewalks shrieking “Cleent! Cleent!” as Mr. Eastwood saunters up the red carpet at the Palais des Festivals. At Cannes, I’ve attended a black-tie party on the beach at midnight catered by Taiwanese chefs flown in for the occasion, then, ten hours later, gone to the fabled Hôtel du Cap for a small lunch with the stars of Pulp Fiction.
Cannes’s organizers carefully cultivate this image of elegant high style, but the sophistication comes with more than a tincture of sanctimony. The festival was originally conceived in 1939 as an antifascist response to the filmfest in Venice, and though war delayed its launch for seven years, it has basked in its moral authority ever since. Today, Cannes prides itself on not genuflecting before the rampaging vulgarians of Hollywood even as it avidly courts their presence. In truth, the festival’s air of high-minded hauteur is something of a sham. Cannes reminds me of those starlets whose topless photographs on the beach are an obligatory feature of media coverage. As a newcomer, I was startled to discover that those young beauties aren’t really sunbathing. Practical women, they peel off their tops for the camera, then quickly put them back on. The Riviera can be chilly in May.
The festival cleverly practices the same sort of calculated exhibitionism. For all its movie stars and palaver about cinematic art, Cannes is essentially a glorified trade fair whose headquarters, the Palais des Festivals, is a sandy-pink monstrosity half-fondly known as the Bunker. Upstairs, the Grand Théâtre Lumière may be offering the world premiere of an ultra-refined competition film by Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien, but descend into the bowels of the building, and you discover the dark truth of international cinema—the cheesy, greedy, shameless Cannes Market. Forget about art. Forget even about Hollywood. Here, you find the things that never make The New York Times or Entertainment Tonight. Sad-eyed reps for Balkan film industries handing out cheap brochures, posters for deliriously uncopyrighted Third World knockoffs—The Matrix 4—and stills for action pictures starring the relatives of B-list stars. In small showrooms, scores of distributors openly scrutinize the pornographic DVDs that make more money than the whole Taiwanese film industry ever could. The market is world cinema’s throbbing id, and its tireless hucksterism carries over into the streets. Back in the mid-’90s, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis caused gridlock by throwing Planet Hollywood T-shirts to a surging mass of thousands. A couple of years later, an electronic billboard for The Spy Who Shagged Me was planted just outside my hotel window. Hour after hour, late into the night, Austin Powers kept blaring, “It’s Cannes, baby ... It’s Cannes, baby.”
It certainly is. And this head-on collision of the high and the low, the graceful and the tacky, makes the festival utterly exhausting—the sensory onslaught goes on 24 hours a day. When you tell people you’re going to Cannes, they think that you’ve got it made, that you’re somehow wandering into La Dolce Vita. But though Fellini’s film did win the festival (and gave us the nifty word paparazzi), covering Cannes is not exactly like splashing in the Trevi Fountain with Anita Ekberg. It’s about spending 12 days in a media madhouse where starstruck throngs turn a 100-yard walk into a 20-minute slog, grown men have fistfights to get into movies they wouldn’t cross the street to see back home, and 10,000 journalists all battle for the same stories and free drinks.
The festival does what it can to keep things running smoothly. With the sublime sense of rank that typifies the French, journalists are issued badges whose colors announce their status: White is tops, followed by pink, blue, and so forth. These badges determine which screenings you can attend, who goes into the theaters first, even which doors of the buildings you’re permitted to enter. And because they are emblems of power, they carry a startling psychological charge. When I was lucky enough to be upgraded from pink to white—carte blanche!—I was shocked by my newfound allure: The Palais’s stiletto-eyed guards treated me more courteously, and women eyed me with a bit more appreciation. But the true glory of a white pass is that it lets you go into screenings before anyone else, so you can grab a seat right on the aisle: The real professional at Cannes always wants to be able to make a quick getaway.
One of the festival’s great ironies is that those who attend talk endlessly of escaping from its sapping intensity, while much of the world dreams of escaping to Cannes. Yet when you’re caught in the middle of all the action—racing from film to film, press conference to press conference, party to party—you feel you’re not really on the Côte d’Azur but being shot from place to place in some weird equivalent of a pneumatic tube. You may walk up the medieval streets to the old town, Le Suquet, gobble the best pizza in Cannes at La Pizza (invariably packed), or gawk at the Croisette’s plush Belle Epoque hotels—the Martinez, the Majestic, the great white hulk of the Carlton, with its twin towers shaped like Prussian helmets. But even after doing all this for years, you can still feel that you know almost nothing about the city. You’re trapped in an artificial reality.
Everyone who goes to the festival plays a role in creating the illusion that, for 12 days anyway, Cannes is the center of the universe, the place where everything is happening. To be there is exhilarating—fast, furious, and fun—but also more than a little disorienting. That’s why I decided to find out what the city was like when all the media people, myself included, had gone home.
For a start, it looks smaller without the crowds. I had the cabbie drive me along the Boulevard de la Croisette, named for the small cross at its eastern end, and checked out the famous hotels that stand across from the beach like so many stranded ocean liners. The Carlton looked naked without any of its huge 3-D advertisements for Disney, James Bond, or Godzilla. It was noon, an hour whose fierce light Matisse found magnificent but frightening, and the sidewalks were nearly empty; even the trinket sellers from Dakar were looking for shade. Off in the hazy distance, the 900-year-old Suquet Tower gazed down on the old port. For all its air of modernity, Cannes is no latecomer—it’s been around for more than 2,000 years. Settled by the Ligurians and colonized by the Romans, the city’s actually older than Paris or London.
For centuries, Cannes survived as a fishing village known for its mimosa trees. All that changed in 1834 when it was “discovered” by England’s Lord Brougham, who decided to build a villa in the area known as Croix des Gardes. He encouraged his titled friends to follow suit, and the hillside soon become a winter haven for English aristocrats. (The tsarist elite preferred Californie, a district on the other side of town.) Over the next years, this small village was transformed into a tourist mecca, a prize jewel on that mythologized diadem of pleasure known as the Riviera.
But if Cannes was initially made fashionable by genuine aristocrats, it became glamorous with the arrival of a new kind of elite—wealthy bohemians. In the years after World War I, the Riviera’s public image was created by Cole Porter dinner parties, paintings by Picasso and Matisse, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s paean to doomed romance, Tender Is the Night, which he wrote feverishly in Cannes. The world came to associate the Côte d’Azur with a Champagne-and-sun-drenched hedonism, a style of high living adorned with the cachet of high art.
But the Great Depression killed that Riviera (neither artists nor Americans could afford its splendid excesses), and with the launch of the film festival, Cannes became the world’s brightest showcase for another, less refined kind of aristocrat: Bogart and Hepburn, Mastroianni and Loren. The international film stars were mass culture’s version of royalty, public icons made larger than life by the big screen, then whittled down to size by the popular media. If the traditional elite was defined by what it could keep private (owning entire beaches, controlling the press), the new celebrity elite derived its power from what it did in public. Its authority rested on fame. Ostentation ruled—it was good PR. In this gaudy new Cannes, even crime took on the mythic quality of movies: In 1949, the Aga Khan and the Begum (a former Miss France) were robbed of $850,000 in jewelry on the Cannes–Nice road. (Six years later, Cary Grant and Grace Kelly were on the Riviera in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, a movie about stylish jewel thieves.)
That showy Cannes still persists today, both in the casinos, where high rollers come to flaunt their wealth, and in the flashy-hip outdoor restaurant Bâoli, with its aurora borealis lighting and black-clad doormen who seem to be impersonating martial arts ham Steven Seagal. Boating in from their yachts or hopping out of their Benzes, the children of Microsoft and Coca-Cola come here to revel in their postmodern versions of the kinds of parties once attended by Scott and Zelda. They dance on the tables and spray Champagne while disco remixes of Tom Jobim play in the background.
But while Maseratis and Lamborghinis roar through the streets with unnerving frequency, Cannes’s chic image masks a homelier truth: The city depends on money from middle-class tourism. “La Vie Est Un Festival,” is its official slogan, and it hosts more than 150 conventions a year, more than anywhere else in France except Paris. In the 50 weeks of the year when movie stars aren’t swanning into the Palais, the Bunker welcomes thousands upon thousands of dentists, cosmeticians, comic-book collectors, clean-water symposiasts, and Provence-besotted tourists hoping to bask in an aura of glamour they can only diminish.
One afternoon, I went for the luncheon buffet on the Carlton beach, a lovely place to nibble seafood, sip white wine, and watch whatever Onassis-size yachts happen to be sluicing by. During the festival, the restaurant is filled with elegant, graying, vulpine men accompanied by sleek young women with expressions as expensive and empty as a Baccarat ashtray. But today the men all looked like Art Buchwald, their wives like Leona Helmsley. To my left, four dazed souls sat wearing convention badges from Lifestyles, while to my right a bullish, sandy-haired Englishman guzzled a whole bottle of Champagne, his face growing redder and redder until it matched the hue of the crayfish on his plate.
Something cuts loose in people here. Perhaps it’s an effect of the extraordinary light, which pushes everything to Platonic perfection. The sea sparkles like diamonds, the shade devours you like midnight, and colors blaze across your retina. One morning, I took a long walk past the old city with its church and museum, past all the low-rent tabacs and auto-body shops, until I finally reached Croix des Gardes, the quarter where the 19th-century English built their dream castles in blithely eclectic versions of Roman and Gothic and Palladian styles. What extravagant buildings they are! The mansion, Plein Ciel, whose towers rise crazily toward the sky; the Villa Victoria off the Avenue du Docteur-Picaud, with its violet-and-yellow trim and oddball chimneys; the unexpected gazebo that sits on the walkway along Croix des Gardes like an oversize sorcerer’s hat. The Brits who came to the south of France were obviously fleeing sobriety, and they indulged their taste for what has been dubbed Victorian Rogue Architecture—daring colors, fairy-tale turrets, wedding-cake ornateness. Looking at all this fanciful stuff, it suddenly hit me: Cannes was that era’s Las Vegas.
That surreal architectural sense survives today in such buildings as Marina Baie des Anges, an undulating ziggurat that looks as if its architect had taken mescaline and drifted into some Babylonian reverie. The structure’s strangeness is mirrored by the beehive of holiday flats known as Port-la-Galère, a fenced-in development on a rocky promontory west of Cannes. You might call it a piece of do-it-yourself Gaudí, if the great Spanish architect had believed not in God but in tourism.
Cannes is never more magical than at twilight, and near the end of my visit, I decided to enjoy dusk at one of the city’s treasures, Le Restaurant Arménien, out past the Martinez. Although in some theoretical sense it may not be the finest food in town, if I could only eat one meal in Cannes it would be here, under the amiably watchful eye of owner Christian Panossian and his wife Lucie (who does the cooking). The two brought at least 30 dishes—more than a dozen mezedes and grilled meats, until I cried uncle—and I sat by the sidewalk sipping Provençal wine and marveling at the evening’s slow descent. In Cannes, the cobalt-blue sky darkens and thickens over two full hours, and as the balmy night caressed me, the world strolled by to keep me company. An old man with a very young wife gave me a sly, ironic smile—he was pushing a pram. A young North African couple kissed open-mouthed with the indiscreet passion of youth. A ravishing brunette wriggled by on stiletto heels and met my gaze head-on: They still do that in France. As she passed, she gave me a smile that said, “Yes, I know.”
The breeze picked up—night here really is tender—and for the first time ever I fully grasped what I’d missed in all those years of racing around the festival. I understood why aristocrats, both real and imaginary, have been flocking to Cannes for the last 167 years. It’s a beautiful resort. Not a factory, or madhouse, or media event. A resort.