Cannes Do: Bold Carnality Is Not Enough

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Express' Arion Berger sends in her latest dispatch from the Cannes Flim Festival. See all of her reports from Cannes here.

FOUR DAYS IN and right on schedule. I hit the Cannes Wall after about half an hour of walking out on Ulrich Seidl's "Import Export." I would have stayed, even though the film-converging stories about a German slacker-thug and a rather dim Ukranian girl (that's Ekateryna Rak, at left) who switch countries in search of jobs, flotsam in a chaotic economic ocean — is no good. But Seidl is known for his "bold carnality," and that at least means nudity, vicious attack dogs, vicious attacks and clean, symmetric compositions. With naked people.

So over steack-frites, the undertow begins to tug. Walking, waiting, sitting, spending — and for what? The exhilaration of the revelatory films I was fortunate enough to see early on has begun to ebb. Everything since has been fine, just fine. Well-made, well-meaning and worthy. After hearing raves about Li Yang's "Blind Shaft" (a bunch of Chinese miners knock each other off for the insurance money; it's a comedy), we approach his latest, "Blind Mountain," with great expectations. Li can consider my awareness about the plight of women kidnapped and sold as brides to bachelors in backward villages raised — "Blind Mountain" ("Mang Shan") is like "The Wicker Man" with pigs and dried corn instead of nature and sex. But I came to see Christopher Lee in a dress, dancing down to the shore (or, you know, the equivalent), and I get a well-made public-service announcement with some of the best sound editing in the universe. It's fine, really.

We get a late phone call, an invitation to hike down the now completely insane Croisette to have drinks with friends at the Martinez, one of the grand Fitzgeraldian hotels. (At which use of both the pool and the hotel's private beach cost extra, even when you're staying there, we are informed. Uh, thanks?) By the time we head back, the Croisette is en fuego — it's a pickpockety, jostling, smelly, ice cream-dripping nightmare in which everyone is still dressed better than you. I learn the next morning that U2 played in front of the Palais about 15 minutes after we passed.

The young scum are out in force at Le Petit Ane Riche, at right. I look down from the balcony and see dozens of small blue rectangles in the sea of people, everyone checking on the next, better party. It is exactly like looking down from an airplane window at a neighborhood's backyard pools. I wake up in the night and blearily imagine I hear opera music and roaring chatter. I open the balcony doors, and they are still there, younger and scummier than ever. I wonder if it's like a still picture or a film loop — the same crowd, every time, every night, rhubarbing the same words in French. I think of the Ray Bradbury short story "The Crowd." It is 4 a.m.

Tomorrow: Gus Van Sant needs an intervention; Quentin Tarantino can't help
himself and nothing happens. Twice.

Photos by Valery Hache/AFP/Getty Images and Arion Berger/Express