NOTES FROM CANNES

This is Cannes. Here in the white-hot maze there is only one law: the law of film. And only one being: the being of film. Here, the hallucinating denizens are melted into one many-limbed mass: the young filmmakers in shoes of cracked skin; the lascivious producers attached to immaterial makeshift funds, windy-worded rulers of unruly craft; the director who hates the films he isn’t making and haunts every party like an anemic ghoul; the actors who stagger swaggeringly, gushing with scruffy neuroses, hoping to be discovered past life’s now-hobbled prime aboard slowly-sinking ships — all congealed into one vast, virile, wounded chimera.

Here you will find the sales agent dressed as an Armani bell-boy, while his assassin-double disappears in the middle of the mad night to rendezvous with the even madder financier. Here in Cannes, on the blue-sickled bay that scythes ambition like stale blood, are halting beauties drifting between parties with hazy expressions. Here are murderous lemmings goading anxious documentarists with films about time’s cliff-face and suicidal tribes. Or grinning documentarists who have been to outer space and sleep alone at the North Pole under lonely and engorged stars. Or the man with the film poster on a sandwich board, wandering around as if he lost a bet, which he has, forever, hawking either an unmade film or a mirror of hunger. In this celluloid, despoiled jungle you will find many such radiant screens crackling with impossible subjects. Regiments of directors bivouacking together in the polyamorous hills, their digs spilling over with fast food, slow agony, and delayed tumescence. Salaried employees of film companies from cold climates dancing dementedly at the sweltering wedding of secret and unmet relatives. It’s all one big adulterous party swooping from lubricated streets to slick abandoned rooftops where no one is sure how they arrived, and no one knows how to leave. Armies of desperadoes claiming to know so-and-so who said they could get in, even though they aren’t on any list but St. Peter’s, their names shrouded in five-o’-clock shadow, their tuxedos exhaling humiliation like a dying chimney, powerless and reified among scorning subjects.

Here are starlets being made up in rooms by fawn-faced sycophants. Agents being made up in lobbies by sleek-haired arsonists. The dazzling, golden ones now bursting in extreme slow motion upon the scene. Or the ones who burst long ago, withered as stiffened fruits, dry as dead horns in hands of chalk. Or the local boys and girls of summer lured from scorched hills to parade along the Croisette, clutching each other in sweaty argot. The villains disguised as financiers. The old ones with professionals adorning withered and windfalled arms. The hunter prowling for profane believers. The adulterers that have left wives and husbands outside of cinema’s ever-soiled bed, and lie wrapped here and panting, sheeted in screens, overlooking the oedipal waters, beasts swaddled on yachts in silken commerce like concupiscent dolls. The ones here for tusks of art, discussing books unread with minds hard and ivory-smooth. Or those old horror buffs with ironical gazes beneath ragged hair beside sad, sacrificial partners. This is Cannes: these students with glistening eyes and cigarette-smoke dreams tall as super-yachts; these roots of desire yanked from cracked and wanting earth; these immense dancing fools breaking naked waves in cobbled streets between grand hotels where silent stars gaze with loud longing; this magnificent trembling of unrealized futurity; this sudden swelling of signs upon jewel-edged shores; an apparition of crushed husks oozing soft centers where hummingbirds and crows feed. This: overflowing crater of imagination. This: visceral kiss in the darkness of a screening-roomed submarine. This: swarming miasma of scars and tongues.

And somewhere in all this, yes, there are films. Tiny films brimming with schools of thought, or fantastic films stuffed with mountains of motorcycles. Big films with planeloads of sublimated bullets that seek victims’ hearts like critics. A cinema of slow donkeys devouring root and branch, bulb and stamen, petal and pistil; a cinema of swift pistols and slim-shanked shamen. Flowers of light devoured by hustlers, hit-men, hopefuls, the happy, the hateful; hatfuls of charlatans, stained with salt and sugar. Yes, this grand almanac of narratives slung on the sloped shoulders of legionnaires marching sad-souled into the blood-warm sea, chanting to czars of the ambush of art and all these capitalist wounds exquisite as roses. This, this is Cannes: mutant guardian of the last labyrinth of cinema.

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