MOVIES : Postcards From Le Edge : In which our intrepid correspondent strikes it rich at the Cannes Film Festival, a.k.a. Hollywood by the Sea, and learns how to stop worrying and love pate.

Color faxes from Cannes. . . .

Day 1

Bonjour, Mes Amis:

Well, as you can see from the postcard photo below (does she have an “all-over” tan or what!!!), I’m here. First day Cannes ’95 and it is gorgeous on the Cote d’Azur (especially on the beach, if you get my drift). Flying into Nice was breathtaking. Beautiful green hills rolling down to a turquoise sea, and the taxi ride over to Cannes was like drifting through a lush landscape painting.

What a dream spot! Cannes is nestled on a crescent-shaped bay with sandy beaches and beachfront restaurants on one side of La Croisette--that’s the main street, divided by elegant palms and glorious flower beds--and a bank of hotels, apartments and chic boutiques on the other. I don’t even mind the back-street fleabag hotel my (ex-) travel agent booked me into. (Note: One-star hotels in France are like one-star movies at home.)

Well, I’m off for a quick swim (wink!) and then to the opening-night gala. Eat your hearts out (while I’m having another chocolate croissant and cafe au lait ).

Adieu,

Henri

Day 2

Bonjour, boys:

Couple of minor setbacks yesterday. I got kicked off the beach five minutes after I dropped my shorts (this nude bathing thing is apparently just for women), then I got lost for two hours trying to find out where to get my press credentials. (French security is everywhere, but the only thing the cops say that I understand is “Non,” which they say a lot!)

When I finally did get my pass, it was the wrong color (white is good, blue is OK, pink is squat; I got pink). So I didn’t have the right pass to get into the opening-night flick (couldn’t have got in anyway--you have to wear a tuxedo!! to the evening screenings). So I stood outside with about 5,000 French fans and watched them go berserk over some bozo they thought was Mickey Rourke!!

I still had a good time. They don’t call this a festival for nothing! The place is jampacked with smiling, laughing (and chain-smoking) people, and there are street performers everywhere. There’s some skinny guy who leaps around like a frog, another character who plays the saw for a dancing monkey, a mother-daughter team in leopard-skin leotards (though I haven’t figured out exactly what it is they do !).

More to come . . . -- Henri

Day 4

Hi, guys:

They say more than 500 films will be shown somewhere during the festival, and in the last two days, they must have put up 10 posters for every one of them! The place is beginning to look as tacky as Times Square.

I finally figured out how this thing works. There are three or four official programs, and the movies for those are all shown in the posh theaters in the Palais des Festival, a three-story slab of concrete and glass that overlooks the historic Old Port and a marina full of rented yachts. There is an unofficial program called Directors Fortnight, which is said to be very hip (Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch were discovered in it!), and hundreds of other movies are being shown in hotel rooms and in the multiplexes around town for press and potential buyers.

Not that I’ve seen any of them. I can’t get arrested with this pink pass. But tonight’s the night! I wangled a personal invitation from the producer of a Swedish film (actually, he and two girls in wet T-shirts were passing them out on the street, but what the hell?), and I’ll be there.

--Henry

Day 5

Hello from hell:

The Swedish film was a disaster. About 400 people showed up with passes and “personal invitations” and they all tried to get in at once. The French crowd control system is brilliant!!! The gendarmes block the theater entrance until a few minutes before the movie starts, then jump out of the way and watch the crowd try to stuff itself through the door!

I was squashed between two Cossacks and Marianne Sagebrecht, and the theater was filled long before my feet touched ground again. If that weren’t enough, somebody in the crowd made off with my wallet! When I tell this to the theater manager, he says, “Ah, oui, Monsieur, Cannes eez not only for the best films in the world, but for the very best thieves.”

I’m going to bed.

--Hank

Day 7

Hi (sigh):

I’ve stepped in it again, and this time, I mean it literally. Cannes must be the dog-doo capital of the world!!! You can tell the locals here from the visitors by simply looking at their hands--if they’re holding a leash, they’re local. Everybody who lives here owns a dog and is accompanied by it at all times, even in restaurants!

If they ever pass a pooper-scooper law, it will be the French Revolution all over again.

H.

Day 8

Got a tremendous break yesterday. Just when I was about to get canned for not writing anything from Cannes (that’s a rhyme, by the way; nobody here calls it “Kahn”), I met a guy who’s producing a movie based on the true story of a dolphin who saved the lives of six people after their boat capsized off the coast of New Zealand (my boss loved it!!!).

The producer asked me to join him and his screenwriter for dinner tonight (don’t worry, I’ll still talk to you guys) at some little place outside of town. I said, “Only if I buy.” (Very continental, don’t you think?) I can’t wait for a decent meal. A few more days on the French dough diet and they’d have to excavate to find my appendix.

Bon appetit, suckers!

Henry

Day 9

Thanks for the fax, fellows. I’m glad you liked the dolphin story, but I’m afraid it’s the first and last I get to write from here. The boss has killed the assignment (in lieu of killing me, he said) and told me to take a boat home.

Here’s what happened: That “little” out-of-town restaurant turned out to be a three-star landmark called Le Moulin de Mougins (I’m sure it means “The rich get richer” in French), and the bill came to about a dollar a calorie. What’s worse, when it was over, these clowns announced that the whole story about the dolphin movie was a joke! They’re just a couple of Cannes hangers-on hazing a rookie (they said it was the pink pass that gave me away!!!).

My room is paid to the end of the festival, and I’m just going to sit in here with the shutters closed until it’s over. At least I won’t step in anything.

--H.

Day 12

Bonjour, babes!!

Check the letterhead. I’m writing to you from the Grand Hotel du Cap, a marble-and-stone monument to stinking wealth just down the coast from Cannes where moguls, stars and dilettantes blow three or four grand a day (!!!) nibbling from a buffet and making deals for movies that will never be invited to this festival.

That’s why I’m here, wearing a blue blazer, T-shirt, tan slacks and burgundy boat shoes with no socks. My partners (Bob, a realtor from Pittsburgh, and Mike, an L.A. waiter who says he once rented a video from Quentin Tarantino) have just signed a seven-figure deal for “Angels Have Fins.”

That’s right!! Before the paper could explain the dolphin hoax, readers there faxed colleagues here and the dolphin story was suddenly one of the festival’s hot topics. Everybody wanted to make a bid on it. Of course, there was no movie to show them, or even a script, but Mike was able to make a few changes in a weeper he’d written about a dog who saves a blind boy from being run over by a train, and people who skimmed it loved it!!!

Gotta run and pick up my new tux. Sharon Stone, who’s interested in playing the lead in “Fins,” invited me to be her date for the closing-night gala (war stories to come!!!).

Is this a great place or what!

Au revoir,

Henri