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I arrived in Cannes with a terrible line from Sélection officielle ringing in my head: ‘To paraphrase Woody Allen,’ Frémaux writes, ‘Cannes is like sex: even when it’s not good, it’s good.’ No one is immune to a degree of corniness when it comes to Cannes. David Lynch’s Cannes Diary, a ten-part series of short missives documenting his experience as jury president in 2002, is primarily a vehicle for him to indulge his love of café au lait, pain au chocolat, baguette avec fromage and vin rouge. He praises the French as ‘the greatest lovers of art and protectors of art in the world’ and looks on everything with childish wonder. That wonder extends to the theatres, where audiences clap and cheer at the tacky festival animation, in which the red staircase floats up into the sky. In Lynch’s words: ‘Everybody knows about carpet. And everybody knows the colour red. So you put those two things together and you get red carpet. But there’s nothing like the red carpet at Cannes.’
Was this Cannes as good as bad sex? Bad sex is usually short. At Cannes, screenings run from 8.30 a.m. to past midnight. If you are a programmer or distributor, it’s typical to watch as many as six films a day. Members of the press rush off to file their reviews or record their podcast ‘takes’. Tickets are released at 7 a.m., four days before each screening, and disappear in seconds. It’s common for screenings to be illuminated by dots of light, as people try to book one film while watching another.
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https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n12/daniella-shreir/diary