The madness for movies Behind the glam of the Cannes Film Festival lies 11 days of hectic manoeuvres and negotiations

Rajeev Masand at Cannes in 2013, wearing a bow tie he had to buy at the last minute

By the time you’re reading this, all the hoopla around this year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival will have likely died down. A cursory glance at the coverage the festival inspires (on social media at least) might easily lead one to mistake it for the Met Gala—an endless parade of glamorous celebrities in dramatic gowns on a never-ending red carpet. But that’s not what makes Cannes the world’s biggest and most important gathering of cinephiles annually.

In the 75 years since it was founded, the festival has emerged as the most impactful showcase for ‘artistic’ films; it launched the careers of influential filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Neil Blomkamp and Xavier Dolan among others. Most significantly, it is where international buyers and distributors, hoping to discover the next global hit or the next awards darling, outbid each other for the titles generating the most heat.

Little of that, sadly, makes for potentially viral Instagram Reels. Which is what explains the fact that most people could correctly describe what Deepika Padukone wore to the opening ceremony (and will even name the designer!) but will come up blank if asked what film opened the festival this year, or how many Indian films were in the official programme.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking the fashion. How can one? Cannes itself takes the fashion very seriously. In 2015, the festival issued an ‘informal’ ban on flat shoes for women, insisting that female attendees had to wear heels on the red carpet. Men don’t have it very much easier. I’ll never forget how friends warned me that I should prepare to be humiliated for forgetting to wear a bow tie with my tux a few years ago. Last minute scrambling around the designer boutiques along the Croisette and the problem was solved—but not before I’d shelled out €95 for an accessory I swear I never wore again.

To be fair, I do have happier Cannes memories. Like sitting down to talk with Angelina Jolie and the late Irrfan Khan about their film A Mighty Heart in an outdoor cabana at the beachside property of the sprawling Hotel du Cap-eden-roc in 2007. Or watching Brad Pitt and George Clooney get a kick out of evading the paparazzi who’d rented boats from which they were training their telephoto lenses to snap the Ocean’s 13 stars while they were doing press the morning before their big premiere. I have vivid memories of being mesmerised by Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox, which screened in the International

Critic’s Week sidebar in 2013, and then craving a good Indian meal immediately after spilling out of the theatre. I remember struggling to beat the jet lag and nodding off for a bit during a morning press screening of Kung Fu Panda in 2008. And I can never forget how everyone in that hall chuckled loudly at the sheer deliciousness of Force Majeure, Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s stinging meditation on marriage and masculinity, which took the Jury Prize in the festival’s Un Certain Regard section in 2014.

For me, Cannes is as much about the madness as the movies. The racing to file a report immediately after a screening, but in time to catch the next one. The search for a hot Asian meal after nearly a week of cold salads and gum-tearing baguettes. One evening some years ago, a group of us were accused of lying that we’d paid the check because the waiter at our restaurant couldn’t find the €300 our colleague swore he had left in the bill folder. Turned out he’d put it in a menu, mistaking it for the bill folder, thus leading to the embarrassing confusion.

About seven years ago, I stopped going to Cannes. It was too hectic, too expensive, and increasingly hard to land coveted interviews with international filmmakers and actors because those films hadn’t secured Indian distribution yet, making it pointless for those studios to do press with Indian outlets. I don’t miss the dressing up, the long distances to cover on foot between screenings, or the cold dinners on most days.

But few things compare to the exhilaration of discovering a gem in the darkened Palais.

I stopped going to Cannes after finally learning that you absolutely cannot turn on your mobile phone—even if only for a little light to scribble notes—during a screening.

I stopped going to Cannes just when I finally learnt to write in the dark.