Movies

Arts Fair

THE GLORY THAT WAS CANNES

FANTASY ISLAND

They couldn’t get the island to work. Day after day, the crack entertainmentreporting team from the French magazine Actuel could be seen slumped on the beach in front of Cannes’s Majestic hotel, gazing forlornly at the brown polystyrene island they’d built by the pier. The idea was to photograph all the superstars at the thirty-seventh Cannes film festival—Jacqueline Bisset, Robert De Niro, Faye Dunaway, Christopher Reeve, and so forth—on Actuel’s island, where each would clutch the wilting plastic palm tree and perhaps brandish a favorite book or record. But it kept raining. And there were no stars. And what stars there were didn’t much feel like doing it. Finally, Wim Wenders, whose Paris, Texas would win the grand prize, dragged himself down to the island for a session, only to find the little mound listing dangerously leeward and a frogman or two paddling around it, adjusting whatever it is that needs adjusting on sinking fantasies.

BEACH FASHIONS: A REPORT

It rained. It was the wettest Cannes film festival in history. Sometimes it drizzled. One day the mistral blew and it rained horizontally. The bare-breastedstarlet market was way down—but then, it would have been anyway. Like all Riviera beaches, Cannes’s are now topless. Since habitués of the Croisette, that splendid esplanade overlooking the beaches, make an art of strolling past the ranks of exposed curvature with casually averted eyes, a starlet is now more likely to be noticed if she keeps her top on.

Even so, the appearance of Valerie Kaprisky’s ungarbed torso on the ubiquitous posters for La Femme Publique spurred rumors that the movie had been excluded from the official selection because it was too naughty. Scandale! The film’s initial screening became a riot scene: rampaging crowds, rampaging policemen, torn dinner jackets, ecstatic pickpockets. Predictably, La Femme Publique turned out to be idiotically artsy trash, but the commotion did wonders for its foreign sales. People who wanted to distribute the thing in New Zealand and Venezuela and Senegal pounded on the producers’ door. At Cannes, you see, the days are spent scheming, telephoning, racing breathlessly along the Croisette, all in order to gain entry to something you wouldn’t pay five bucks for in Times Square.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL IN AMERICAN CULTURAL LIFE

Have you seen The Ballad of Narayamal Have you been dying to? Is it playing at a theater near you? I wouldn’t even bring it up, except that The Ballad of Narayama is the film that won the grand prize at Cannes last year.

HOW DEALS ARE MADE

Over a power lunch at the Gray d’Albion hotel, a young producer, Myron Meisel, introduces himself to a respected New York theater owner, Dan Talbot. Asked what he does for a living, Meisel bubbles, “Well, I’m a producer, a writer, and an attorney. And I sell my semen.” Talbot, who doubtless thinks his new acquaintance is referring to the highly regarded Siemens projector system, replies, “Oh, that’s a very fine product. We don’t use it in our theaters, but it’s used all over Europe.” There is an eerie pause. “No, no,” sputters Meisel. “I mean my actual semen. When my wife’s away, why waste it? I can get thirty-five dollars for ten c.c.’s!”

A guy like that will always come in under budget.

THE ROLE OF THE PRESS

Members of the press have it cushy at Cannes. Every day, they go to the two-year-old “New Palais,’’ a lowering concrete castle where the official movies are shown (it’s known affectionately as the Bunker), and they pick up reams of mail: invitations, schedules, hype, hype, hype. Often there are press conferences, and I’ve never attended one where a question was asked because the questioner wanted to know the answer. Questions are a form of braggadocio; they are posed to make the questioner known to his peers, and to impress the filmmakers. A lot of journalists can’t figure out what to do at Cannes except impress filmmakers. And go to parties. There are hundreds of luncheons and dinners, and the same people are at each one, devouring the same food. Pate en croute. Lamb. For dessert, Oriental sweets: kumquats in a sugar glaze, strawberries with icing. The party for the soporific French movie Fort Saganne was held in the Carlton hotel, a wedding cake of a place whose portals had been buttressed by giant pictures of Roger Moore, and whose lobby had become a convention, full of booths and billboards and hucksters. Gerard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve and Philippe Noiret were there, and the invited were handed gorgeous Hermes silk scarves, made unsuitable for any occasion by the words “Fort Saganne’’ scrawled across them in black. The party for Under the Volcano was even grander, with garish south-of-the-border decor, a Latin-flavored orchestra, a “Day of the Dead’’ chocolate cake (replete with sugary skulls), and an unidentifiable dish that proved the French don’t know from tacos. The whole thing was like a Mexican Bar Mitzvah.

Luncheons were more intimate— great opportunities for journalists to impress filmmakers. At one, held in the Carlton’s beach restaurant, the Alexander Salkind Air Force nearly drowned out the honored filmmakers, Werner Herzog and Marek Kanievska. Every year, Salkind (who produced the Superman films) hires a squadron of airplanes to circle above the beaches with banners announcing his next picture. This year, there were fifteen planes declaring "SANTA CLAUS-THE MOVIE”: THE GREATEST LIVING LEGEND OF ALL TIME. Salkind is indelibly linked with Cannes, not least because his wife, Berta, frequently goes mad there. This year, she had a film at the festival called Where Is Parsifal?; she had written it under the name Berta Dominguez D. and starred in it under the name Cassandra Domenica. The film was terrible, but Berta kept her fans happy. Near the end of the festival she reportedly took off all her clothes at the beauty salon of the Majestic hotel and had to be dragged away by security personnel.

As Salkind’s planes flew into the distance to prepare for yet another circle, I heard angry voices on my left. John Vinocur, the Paris bureau chief of the New York Times, was trying to impress Werner Herzog by telling him how bad, how pat, how simplistic his new film, Where the Green Ants Dream, was. “Veil, I don’t sink it’s so simplistic," Herzog began, but he was saved by the film critic Roger Ebert, who sat across the table from Vinocur and told him he was dead wrong about the film. “It’s simplistic!” Vinocur yelled. “I think if you look at it closely. .Ebert explained. Herzog sank back contentedly in his chair and watched the Santa Claus platoon drone by.

INTERNATIONAL STARDOM

A crowd has gathered on the bulwark overlooking the Majestic hotel’s beach. Amateurs are snapping pictures: there must be a Star down there. I take a peek. Sitting at a table, a man is talking into a reporter’s tape recorder. I don’t recognize the man.

I ask a bystander who this Star is. With some incredulity, and not a little saliva, the bystander answers. I don’t recognize the name.

I ask what movies the Star has been in. I don’t recognize their names.

Feeling hopelessly ignorant, I ask what country the Star is from. I don’t recognize its name...

Stephen SCHIFF