Cannes couldn’t have delivered a better first day if it tried.
That’s except for the online ticketing system, the lags and crashes of which have made the headlines of Screen International and Variety, before the Festival has even properly begun. Today was the fourth day of ordering tickets through the system, which releases tickets for screenings in four days at 7am CET sharp every day. And as the number of attendees have increased, the system’s struggles have worsened. But waking up at 6:50am, opening all of our devices, and refreshing and refreshing them for an hour until we manage to snag one precious ticket—is that not one of the definitive cornerstones of this year’s Cannes experience?
Every part of the Cannes experience is mystified, deified—even something as mundane as collecting your festival badge, which was the first order of business today. We approached a seemingly daunting line at 9am, but we were out of the door at 9:30am with badges and freebies in hand. The color of your badge determines your rank within the Cannes screening hierarchy, and you don’t get to know your color until the person working behind the desk hands you your badge. For this year, each person has also been given a poster of an edition of the Festival (an eco-friendlier but considerably smaller gift than the backpacks of the past), and of course the crowds instantly got to the business of comparison—I got 1983, while Ben was disappointed with his 1999. It’s these little details that add to the myth of the Cannes experience. Our badges were revealed to be in orange, and I never even found out what that means.
After we covered ourselves in sleeves as we feared the “proper attire” mandate (while people showed up in shorts and sandals), we walked up the steps to the Debussy Theatre for the first Cannes Classics screening of the year: Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (1973). Even though the Debussy Theatre is only the second-biggest theatre in the complex, which is aptly, if not pompously named the Palais des Festivals, walking up that mini red carpet felt magical. It’s like standing in line for Space Mountain in Disneyland, except that would be an insult to Disneyland.
And how can one mock Cannes for pomposity when it lives up to its prestige and glamour? After the confusion of finding our seats marked in French (confusion, as you will find out, is a big part of the Cannes brand), the Festival’s head programmer Thierry Frémaux showed up to introduce the screening (in French only, of course). M. Frémaux has become quite a celebrity in the film world, so it was a surprise to me that he would show up to a Cannes Classics screening. After he directed applause to all the people who worked hard for this restoration, we watched a nearly four-hour-long black-and-white French comedy as our first film of the Festival. There was no better choice for our jet-lagged bodies at a French film festival.
And I haven’t even gotten to the best part! Many film festivals around the world screen four-hour-long black-and-white French movies. Some can even screen them in auditoriums with 1,000 carpeted plush seats like the Debussy. But nowhere else could we witness the stars of the film, Françoise Lebrun and the one and only legendary Jean-Pierre Léaud, stand up and receive a ten-minute-long standing ovation after the screening ends. It was difficult to perceive what was happening of my eyes: an immortalized icon of world cinema, standing in flesh and bone in front of us. Léaud shrunk to the size of a human being and grew as big as the entire theatre at the same time. It felt natural to clap for ten minutes, because who would want to stop clapping for Jean-Pierre Léaud? Only Cannes can deliver these myth-making (or in this case, myth-reaffirming) moments.
The first day of Cannes might have ended with only one screening for most of us (except for Ben, who is now heading to both The Truman Show and Coupez—good luck), and we may be dead tired, but I cannot feel more rewarded. Is it sycophantic of me to sing the praises of the Festival to high heavens? Whatever, heaven is a place on earth.