I’m sitting here in Nice airport, surrounded by seemingly antisocial ex-holidaymakers waiting to board my flight back to Edinburgh. It’s been a hot, hectic week and despite the fact that I seem to have lived in queues for eight days straight I’m itching to be back on the Croisette.
It feels as though I’ve had just a brief stopover in Cannes; a city that’s frantically trying to keep itself in order as its population triples, made up mostly of slightly psychotic film makers and buyers. Saying that, there’s no real hostility once you’re inside the famous Palais. In fact, I find that most of the people working for the festival seem to have a great attitude towards this outlandish but now rather familiar situation.
The hostility that I had been told so much about seems to stem from the embarrassing attitude that a lot of visiting journalists adopt. They’re trying their hardest to try and break down the firmly cemented hierarchy that is in place here. I adore that, though. There’s nothing quite as entertaining as watching a man point at his badge and yell at security, completely unbeknownst to the fact that he’s fighting an impossible battle.
I did manage to catch a couple of films in the last few days. I’ve been sitting on a review of Paolo Sorrentino’s latest, Youth – starring Michael Caine as a music conductor that has taken a retirement holiday to the Swiss Alps. The film itself got quite a few heckles and boo’s from the crowd following its screening. Perhaps because the film wasn’t quite as polished and riotous as his last work, The Great Beauty. Or, it may be due to the fact that it features musician Paloma Faith, riding the roof of a sports car in a bikini warbling her latest songs. Anyway, more of that to come later.
Following on from that I ventured down to the Espace Miramar to catch a highly talked about film in the ‘Semaine de la Critique’, or Critic’s Week. Running alongside the official selection at the festival, it’s often the place to catch gorgeous, low key cinema.
I managed to see Krisha – a stirring and claustrophobic debut from American director, Trey Edward Shults. It is a family drama in the most literal sense; the cast comprised of Shults own siblings, aunts and parents and shot in his mother’s home. It tells the story of a woman returning to her family following an initially unexplained ten year absence and the struggles she goes through to try and slot herself back in to their lives. It was tastefully done, painfully human and featured a bold lead performance from Krisha Fairchild. It sort of dilly-dallies for a great deal of its second act and the score may be rather grating, but flaws aside its understandable why American festival SXSW awarded this their prize for Best Drama. It deserved it based on Shults homely ambitions alone.
I also managed to nab a place on the red carpet for the midnight world premiere of Gaspard Noé’s controversial ‘3D sex’ film that split critics. I met a few fellow writers and film industry buffs in the queue and managed to witness the Lumiere from downstairs for the first time! It was interesting to see the festival from the perspective of people who had been going for years, and their thoughts on what would win the top prize.
There’s a still a couple more reviews to come that I will have written up for you all over the weekend! I hope Cannes has been a start of a fruitful relationship between The Edinburgh Reporter and international film festivals; letting all of Edinburgh locals recognise the journey that films take before they end up on the Filmhouse or Cameo doorstep!
Editor of Frowning.us (SSJA 2014 Student Publication of the Year) & Film Writer for The Edinburgh Reporter
