Opening Day at Cannes 2011!
Chock-a-block with stars, this year's opening ceremony honored auteur Bernardo Bertolucci, while Woody Allen's latest European romp, his love letter to France entitled Midnight in Paris, was selected as the initial film to start off the 12 days of cinematic celebration.
Photographer Jerry Schatzberg and actress Faye Dunaway shared a moment in the May sun as well. (It is Schatzberg's 1970 photo of Dunaway from Puzzle of a Downfall Child that is the official photo of Cannes 2011.)
A-list press conferences, designer gowns and classic photos of past screen goddesses splashed the Croisette. The ever-glamorous Salma Hayek and Antonio Banderas -- voiceover leads in this November's Puss in Boots -- posed with a large gray feline torso on Cannes' Carlton Pier.
As for me? I was on the plane ride of hell.
The first leg was a 10-hour torture fest as three screaming toddlers were much too close for comfort. Even having my iPod blare the appropriately chosen French work of Maurice Ravel, the growing crescendo to Bolero threatening to cause my ears to burst into flame: it was still kids = 1, Ravel = 0.
Adding injury to insult, the woman sitting in front of me retracted her seat all the way back to my kneecaps. When I requested that she reconsider, she adamantly refused. Wearing a short gray smock, she flared back, "I just had stomach surgery! Do you want to see my scar?"
As I was assuring her that no, I had no desire to see her wound, gaping or otherwise, she pointed to her stomach. I couldn't help but notice that instead of jeans, slacks, skirts, what-have-you, she'd opted to clothe herself in elephant-gray tights that looked close to shredding as they stretched around her hefty stems.
This was a look that probably wouldn't be repeated on the Croisette: smock, tights and Robin Hood-type boots. All she needed was a bow and arrow. But let's face it, Russell Crowe has nothing to worry about.
However -- given that Crowe's Robin Hood had been the opening film for Cannes 2010 -- the coincidence gave me pause. And speaking of, um, paws, when I passed by that Puss in Boots statue rising up from the Pier, the huge thighs clad in gray ... I relived that vile plane ride all over again.
To wipe out the memory, I rushed over to check out the second film debuting that night. (The press screening of the Woody Allen film had occurred too early in the day for me to catch it.) In actuality, since Midnight in Paris was considered "out of competition," it seemed all the more important to view the initial offering of the 20 films vying for the coveted Palme d'Or.
And so it was with great anticipation that I lined up to see my first official Cannes film, the Australian movie Sleeping Beauty starring Emily Browning (Sucker Punch) from novelist/first-time director Julia Leigh. Championed by Jane Campion (who won the Palme d'Or in 1993 for The Piano), the movie is described as "a haunting erotic fairytale ... a young university student drawn into a hidden world of beauty and desire."
Lead actress Emily Browning is indeed young. And it's certainly a hidden world. But beauty? If a girl repeatedly drugged to a state of unconsciousness while angry old men molest her, burn her with cigarette butts and throw her on her head is considered "beauty" ... well, then, I may have to rethink the gray-clad thighs.
And while Jury Chairman Robert De Niro has suggested that there are no front runners for first prize ("I’m not sure what I’m looking for. We’ll sit there and see the movies and figure it out"), I'm betting dollars to doughnuts (or is that Euros to éclairs?) that Sleeping Beauty will still be sound asleep when the winner is announced.
Ah, but the Cannes night is young. There are so many films to see, yachts to view, gowns to appreciate, I'm sure there must be quality right around the very next corner. I'm not ready to Cannes-cel out Cannes. Certainly not yet.
Until next time, I'll be sitting in the dark as usual ...
