My alarm blares at 7:00 a.m. Groggily, I nearly fall out of a mattress sagging on a broken bed frame as I rush to press snooze, lest I accidentally wake my roommate. I feel like I’m in the quad again—a twin XL, communal showers, an earlier–than–humane wake–up time (thanks, 8:30 a.m. screenings and freshman fall astrology in DRL), and, of course, a roommate whose sleep schedule is seemingly orchestrated by the powers that be to be at odds with mine.
It’s my fourth day at the Cannes Film Festival and my third day in a row of dragging myself out of bed to see a movie before 9 in the morning. I’d barely made it up three flights of winding faux–marble stairs at about 2 a.m. last night after securing an orchestra–seating ticket to the premiere of Pigen med nålen (or The Girl with the Needle if you, like me, don’t speak Swedish). An absolutely brilliant and absolutely brutal two hours of infanticide shot in black and white, it left me with my head in my hands in a tux on the side of the road, frantically Googling “Swedish baby serial killer lesbian real life???” I almost couldn’t get into the premiere the night before because I forgot my bowtie, and was saved by a kindly security guard magically procuring one from out of her pocket. I’m glad she had one to spare; a man a few feet ahead of me got turned away for not wearing dress shoes, and if I didn’t have a bow tie, I wouldn’t have been allowed in, either. It’s left me sleep–deprived and viciously anxious.
Homemade ticket-begging sign
I’ve been able to shake my jet lag, but not a certain sense of out–of–placeness. I keep catching myself in the reflections of shop windows or in the mirror above the sink in my room with a drain that does not work, feeling confused. Me? I’m here? My hair is too short (“feeling very Tom Hardy f**kass postapocalyptic fade,” I texted my friends the day after we watched Mad Max: Fury Road so that I could pregame watching Furiosa—a movie that absolutely was not worth its 8:30 a.m. start time) and too jet–black, and my shirts are a little too wide around the neck. I am far from put together.
And I’m having an incredible time. Sure, the food is overpriced and mediocre, I have the sleep schedule of an 8–year–old with a perpetual sugar high, and I haven’t had a non–movie–related–conversation in about 100 hours, but there’s nowhere I’d rather be. I’ve ditched my usual frozen–in–2003 emo digs for linen pants and well–fitted polos, and I’ve clocked a frankly mortifying amount of time on Letterboxd. I’m deep into Cannes, and my time here has only barely begun.
Days blur. Time loses meaning. I’m seeing five movies a day sometimes, and that’s light work compared to other classmates in my cohort, one of whom ended up seeing almost 50 movies in twelve days. (I clocked in at a respectable 33, which is comfortably middle–of–the–pack, but I can also brag that I only fell asleep during two or three of those, which is comfortably way fewer than many other Cannesgoers.)
In many ways, Cannes reminds me of Newark on a holiday eve: lawless, filled with more slow walkers than you could ever conceive of, and packed with people drinking before noon. The early evenings are populated by a sea of people in their Sunday best holding handmade signs and begging for premiere tickets, and the late nights are a crush of D–listers at hotel bars and skeezy 45–year–old Wharton grads trying to flirt with 20–year–olds by asking to read their screenplays. The camera adds ten pounds and a whole lot of glitz and glam that isn’t actually there.
That’s not to say that it isn’t fabulous—it absolutely is. Every day I see a dress that I’m sure costs thousands of dollars and takes my breath away; every few hours I see a movie that changes my perspective on filmmaking, for better or for worse. From close–ups with the Kinds of Kindness cast to winding roads and killer gelato, Cannes is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.
Kinds of Kindness Cast
It’s also—and the French would kill me if they ever heard me say this—kind of a one–for–one for Times Square. I’ve never really understood just how much of a circus the entertainment industry is until now.
Most of it blurs together in a Perks of Being a Wallflower–type montage of beach excursions well past midnight and early mornings in the most decked–out movie theater you’ve ever seen. But there are a few moments that stand out to me, such as the morning after the Megalopolis premiere. The night of the premiere, I didn’t get much sleep, as my roommate and I were planning to stake out the early–morning screening when we woke up. Despite well–made plans, the two of us are half an hour later to the last–minute line than we want to be. Camping out for about three hours, I pass the time by chatting with him and by befriending the two women standing behind me, who are also young college students. When the last–minute line is finally allowed to trickle in to fill a scant number of vacant seats, I get all the way to the front before getting cut off. My roommate and I are the very first people to not get in.
"F**k it, let’s go to Five Guys," I say, defeated. My roommate, a much more optimistic person than myself, convinces me to stay in line. So we wait, and so do the people behind us. After about ten minutes, security tells us that there are exactly four seats open in the theater—one for each of our little temporary groups of four.
The seats are shit. I’m in the front row, all the way to the right, and it’s exacerbating the headache that the absolutely insane visuals from the movie are already giving me. It’s a terrible movie, but such a visually compelling dumpster fire.
Afterward, my roommate and I go to Five Guys (the American urge to eat a hamburger is unrelenting). We spend over an hour discussing how much we didn’t like the movie, and how absolutely wild it was. I run into some other Penn in Cannes people and try my best to explain an utterly unexplainable movie, and that everyone should see in theaters with a friend. I ended up canceling my tickets for the rest of the day because my brain is just too full of Megalopolis.
For what it’s worth, at Five Guys, I bumped into one of the girls who had been waiting behind me and my roommate in line, and she loved the movie. I guess it has a Letterboxd rating distribution graph that looks like a city skyline for a reason.
Other moments stand out, too. Seeing movies that I know I’ll be coming back to again and again—Sister Midnight, Good One, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. Going on sweet treat excursions with friends between movies. Bumping into other Penn in Cannes students as I exit a theater that they’re entering. The mornings after heavily–discussed movies—Megalopolis, The Shrouds, Anora. Frantically checking the jury scores online and seeing if the group’s thoughts lined up with the critics. Cursing out our phones when we think that people are lauding directors on the basis of their names alone; clapping and cheering when we think that a film’s praise was well–deserved. The area outside of the main theater, the Lumière, feels like a fictionalized stock exchange, what with the hustle and bustle, and bold statements said with absolute confidence and with absolutely nothing to back them up. I get it. There’s nothing that has fueled my determination like the rush I got from no sleep, crappy two–euro coffee, and mainline as much film as I could handle in a day, all for two weeks straight.
Beach Screening
I wanted to write this piece in the thick of things, and I did start it that way. Then I got a few days in, everything picked up pace, and I found myself at an overpriced French café eating bad beef tartare while catching up with a girl I knew from high school who I bumped into on my way out of Megalopolis, and I lost all track of time. I’m recollecting now, combining jotted notes and half-formed class diary entries into a piece, and it feels like so much time has passed even though very little has. Two weeks ago I was on the floor of a line at a movie theater in the south of France, telling my roommate about all the bad life choices I’ve made at Penn; now, I’m texting him to figure out when he gets back to LA so I can drive an hour to get dinner with him and our other friend as we all try to make it in entertainment this summer.
As I’ve written about before, I’m newish to movies in the grand scheme of things. But despite the confusion, the lack of sleep, and the language barrier (French people are not very nice), I started to feel like I really belonged at Cannes. I may have some gaps in my classic film knowledge (that I’m working hard to fill), and I may feel as unsteady in the Marketplace as I did in that fated freshman astrology class that prepped me for my deeply criminal wakeup times for movies at Cannes. But I know what I want, I know what I like, and I know what I hope to make. And as long as I can one day make something that just one person will review on Letterboxd with the same cult fervor as I reviewed Sister Midnight with, I’ll know the twin XL will have been worth it.
