A Senior Correspondent's Dispatch from the Fringes of the World's Most Glamorous Film Festival (Bus Route 200, Rear Seats)
BY JACKIE ESISKEL, SENIOR FILM CORRESPONDENT
IRREVERENT Magazine | Film & Culture Desk
CANNES, FRANCE — The panini costs four euros. I know this because I've been eating one every day for five days, from the same counter at a boulangerie seventeen minutes off the Croisette, past the intersection where a man on a motorized scooter nearly ended my career in film criticism permanently. Four euros. I have written down every expenditure in a small green notebook I bought at a tabac for two-fifty, which tells you everything you need to know about where IRREVERENT Magazine falls in the hierarchy of credentialed press.
I am sitting in the rear seats of Bus Route 200. A woman in a Valentino sundress is standing three feet away, presumably also going to Cannes, presumably not to review films. She has a security lanyard with a color I have never seen before in eleven years of attending this festival. I don't know what color that is. I don't want to know. Some knowledge ruins a man.
Let me tell you about the Palais.
The Palais des Festivals is a building that was designed specifically to make you aware of your own irrelevance. The architecture communicates a singular message: you, specifically, are not who we had in mind. The steps — those famous steps, the ones you've seen in a thousand photographs — are cordoned off approximately eighteen hours a day. The other six hours they are populated by people who are also cordoned off, just on the inside of the rope. I have walked past those steps enough times to qualify for a pedestrian's Palme d'Or. I have never gone up them.
This year I was here to cover the Competition slate, which is ambitious given that my press screenings are at 8:30 in the morning in a room with air conditioning calibrated to replicate the interior of a commercial blast freezer. I watched the new Jane Schoenbrun film — Teenage Lust at the Death Camp, a kind of psychedelic coming-of-age horror that vibrates at a frequency younger people seem to find profound — sitting next to a Belgian journalist who ate a croissant throughout the entire third act. I have opinions about the film. I have more opinions about that croissant.
The film everyone is talking about (be patient), naturally, is the one I had the most trouble getting into. Four attempts at the evening premiere, four polite rejections from a young man in a white jacket who looked at my badge the way customs agents look at a nervous traveler. I eventually watched a screener on my laptop in the hotel room — Hotel is generous; Room with Aspirations is more accurate — with the audio one notch below what I would prefer because the walls are thin and my neighbor has already knocked twice.
There was a standing ovation of nine minutes for a Romanian drama about inheritance law. Nine minutes. I timed it. I was not in the room, but I heard about it from a colleague who was, and she seemed genuinely moved, which I respected, and also slightly resented. I've been moved by films before. I was moved by Memories of Murder, which Park Chan-wook made back before he went fully baroque — before Oldboy, before all of it. That man could wring grief out of a parking lot. Nobody was giving nine-minute standing ovations in a multiplex in Chicago when I first saw it. We just sat there, stunned, then drove home.
On Wednesday I attended a panel called "The Future of Auteur Cinema in a Streaming-First World," which was held in a conference room adjacent to a party I was not invited to. The muffled bass from that party provided an inadvertent score for a discussion about artistic independence. Nobody on the panel acknowledged this. Professionals.
I spotted Benicio del Toro at a distance of roughly forty meters. He was wearing sunglasses. I was wearing the same jacket I've worn to this festival for three years running, which I consider a personal brand and which my editor considers a cry for help. I did not approach del Toro. I had nothing to say to him that he would find interesting, and I've reached the age where I know this about myself.
The Croisette at night is genuinely beautiful, I'll give it that. The light on the water, the palms moving in the warm air, the superyachts lit up offshore like floating tax incentives. I walked it twice this week at around 11 p.m., after the dinners I wasn't at had wound down and the people who attend those dinners had gone somewhere even more inaccessible. The city empties out in a specific way. You can feel the weight of all the commerce and aspiration lifting, just briefly, and what's left is a town on the Mediterranean in May, which is not nothing.
My panini tomorrow will also cost four euros. I've already identified the boulangerie.
I fly home Saturday. I have four pieces to file, eleven pages of notes, and a recording of myself whispering plot summaries into my phone in a dark screening room that I will spend the better part of Friday deciphering. I do not have a photograph of the steps. I do not have a party lanyard in an aspirational color.
I have, however, seen some movies. A few of them were excellent. That still means something, even from the rear seats of Bus Route 200.
Editor's Note: A few things. The photographer (Rumena) got you going up the steps, I included it here! Jane Schoenbrun's film is called "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma." Also, "Memories of Murder" was directed by Bong Joon-ho, not Park Chan-wook. And the standing ovation you cite as "nine minutes" was actually seven minutes, which has been widely reported. Park Chan-wook directed "Oldboy."
A note in response to the Editor: Scott, with respect — and I do mean that — I have been watching Korean cinema since before it had a section at Blockbuster, and I stand by the attribution. Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho came up together, they have collaborated in various capacities, and if you go back and look at the liner notes on the original Korean release of Memories of Murder you will find the situation is more complicated than the Wikipedia page suggests. As for the standing ovation: I was there, or adjacent to there, and I timed it myself on my watch, which runs slightly fast, which would actually make the real number higher than nine, not lower. And regarding the Schoenbrun film — I may have the title wrong. The spirit is correct. The spirit, Scott, is always correct. Lastly, I will note that you published the piece.
Editor's Note: That's not how math works.