2009 may be remembered as a “down year” for the Cannes Film Festival — certainly, some press and industry faces familiar from previous years were nowhere in sight; certainly, celebrity directors like Ang Lee, Pedro Almodovar and Quentin Tarantino showed up with new films that failed to single-handedly rescue the world economy by the end of their first screenings — but isn’t it a down year all around, not just for film but for, like, life on Earth? In a time as stagnant and depressed as this, what can we reasonably expect a film festival to do? Never once in my eight days at the festival did I question whether Cannes does or does not matter. Spending hours each day in Market badge lines composed of Cannes’ equivalent of rabble (myself included — I was standing in those lines because my coverage is not important enough to the Festival to merit press accreditation) the weight of the event doesn’t seem up for debate — you’re literally fighting over seats with too many people to whom Cannes matters to.
Back in New York now, maybe I should have a clearer perspective, but it’s hard. Even as the bigger films failed to meet my expectations, even as Lars Von Trier stomped in like Godzilla, swallowed the press corps whole and left the festival in ruins (and I *liked* Antichrist), even if I went home without seeing anything that matched 2008’s A Christmas Tale or Modern Life as sure-to-endure masterworks international cinema … I’ll still do whatever it takes to go back next year. I spend an awful lot of time covering things out of obligation because they’re perceived to matter to someone; in return, let me be selfish. Let me have Cannes, if for no other reason than because it matters to me.
And with that: after the jump, you’ll find my collected coverage. At right, the one photo I managed to take of “local color” - because even the coffee at Cannes this year came with unneccessary nudity.
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In the twelve months since I was last in Cannes, I forgot the difference between “real” Festival screenings, and Marche (market) screenings. Everyone talks about the rigorous rules of Cannes festival screenings — the ceremony of lining up; the draconian stratification of press badges, in which your relative importance is proscribed by the color of the plastic ID card around your neck; the near-ritual standing ovations. What people generally don’t bother talking about, and I had forgotten, is the diametrically opposed informality of the market: the fact that lining up is only required for the hottest tickets (usually those that have already screened once in the festival); that most films play to mostly empty rooms, with badgeholders drifting in and out throughout; and that sometimes things happen that defy any attempt to trainspot the schedule to carefully.
So I arrived at the Star for the 9:45 screening of Kore-eda’s Air Doll twenty minutes early, not realizing that at 9:30, the lights would go down and I’d get a surprise glimpse at a 10-minute extended trailer for Gainsbourg, Je t’aime moi non plus (that, at least, was the title flashed at the end; IMDB calls it, Serge Gainsbourg, vie héroïque), written and directed by French graphic novelist Joann Sfar.
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