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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