Reading the morning papers in Cannes is often a shocking experience. This morning, British film critics and reporters on the Croisette focus on two things: the stars (and the gossip) and The Da Vinci Code, screened yesterday evening.
We can read, for instance: "There is nothing, but nothing, the Cannes film festival loves more than a Hollywood movie that is complimentary about France."
"Complimentary about France", a series of postcards so badly filmed it makes you feel like never going to Paris again? French policemen look, act and speak like degenerates, and Audrey Tautou has been so Hollywoodised, with her Desperate Housewife's hairstyle, that she has lost all her gamine allure. If you really want to laugh and read the ultimate review of the film, read Libération's piece: for once my colleagues have written a film review in which you actually understand every word.
Some wonder why such a bad film should open the festival, and weave elaborate theories about the relationship between Cannes and Hollywood, but there is no need to go that far: it is just a tradition; the opening film is almost always a turkey.
Now, what nobody seems to be talking about a propos of yesterday's glitzy opening ceremony, is Vincent Cassel's opening speech. The French actor (La Haine, The Crimson River, L'Appartement) delivered a very well-written and highly political speech, talking about the 177 different ethnic communities living in Paris and its outskirts; more, he said, than in London and New York.
Of course, he continued, these communities had lived together more or less successfully for a very long time, and they had done so under the same roof in France, a secular, Latin country. He went on - not in English, and using Arabic and Mandarin - to celebrate the reflection here in Cannes of France's cultural diversity. The cinema industry, he said, flocked each year to the Riviera to celebrate the biggest feast of world cinema, not only American films but work from all corners of the planet.
It's a shame his words escaped some of my Anglophone friends.
