Romance vs. reality

The disquieting Richard Yates short story “Evening on the Cote d’Azur” opens on a beach in Cannes at the exact moment that a plump New Jersey Navy wife is trying to lasso her unruly 5-year-old. Surrounded by bronzing nude bodies with “alien” stares, the woman beats a painfully self-conscious retreat.

Soon afterward, as she trudges back to her apartment with her three young children in tow, Yates writes that, “as far as Betty Meyers was concerned the French could keep their Riviera. They could take their whole lousy country and turn it over to the Communists tomorrow.”

No matter how beautifully cerulean the Mediterranean and inviting the sun, I understand how Betty Meyers feels, especially when the midpoint of the festival arrives and the great movies have yet to materialize. This disenchantment is familiar to film critics who come to Cannes, in part because the promise of the festival, the host city and its romantically storied legend, can seem a long way off from the reality, both as it appears on the screens and out on the streets. French Web sites promoting the Cote d’Azur may feature extracts from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night,” but these days the view of the Riviera, at least from the street, is distinctly less charmed.

Along the Croisette, the grand hotels are largely gone, replaced by slabs of glass and concrete that indifferently loom over the passing hoi polloi. Gangs of boys dressed in track suits, sporting shaved heads and sometimes squiring massive Rottweillers, parade up and down the Croisette, as do masses of young girls, thin and jittery as greyhounds, along with preening couples and distracted-looking festivalgoers, who always move at a greater velocity.

Close by, an occasional Ferrari or Lamborghini prowls, going nowhere fast, as fleets of Mercedeses steadily ferry festival invitees to their premieres. Nearly everyone here is looking for something, although most won’t be really looking at movies, even those inside the Palais.

What they’re looking for are stars, who until their premieres remain secreted away in costly lairs like the Hotel du Cap-Ferrat or shut up with flanks of handlers and journalists. The star-seekers, congregated in front of the Palais, have been primed for Cannes for weeks, with festival posters lining Paris metros and festival stars like Nicole Kidman adorning magazine covers in preparation for her latest, Lars Von Trier’s festival entry, “Dogville.” Elsewhere, and to more entertaining effect, Kidman currently co-stars with Penelope Cruz in a magazine called Telestar, which features a cover headline that roughly translates as “Duel on the Croisette.” Apparently, the stars “detestent” each other and sparks are expected when Tom Cruise’s former and current leading ladies hit the scene.

Kidman’s talent puts her into a more rarefied category than most promenading down the red carpet (she attracts swarms of paparazzi nonetheless), but for most film critics the big names remain as unreachable as the yachts in the harbor and often, mercifully, as inessential.

For this tribe, the stars exist in an entirely different reality, much like the Cote d’Azur -- that shock of blue you sometimes catch out of the corner of your eye on the way to a screening. You visit that reality only on occasion, since at Cannes keeping your eyes on the screen means that everything else must necessarily fade from view. This is most true perhaps of the city itself, which during the festival shrinks down to a thin ribbon edging the coast, some three city blocks deep and no more than a half-mile long.

The only festivalgoers who deviate from the path between their hotel and the Palais or one of the other screening rooms sprinkled around this quadrant are journalists working the party beat or participating in some publicity event aboard a yacht or in a villa tucked in the hills. A film critic friend has a maxim to which he remains loyal no matter what. Never, he warns, go to a villa -- you might never get back or at least not until dawn, after you’ve hitched or walked the miles back to your hotel, as more than one journalist has been forced to do.

Every so often, though, when the movies have let you down, you can amble into the old part of Cannes, past the tourist restaurants and the souvenir shops and through the winding cobbled streets up, up, up until there’s nowhere farther to climb. It’s only then, far above the city, the harbor, the yachts and the sea that the modern Cannes softens around its edges, blurring into a postcard of paradise. As even Betty Meyers admits in Yates’ story, while driving along the promenade and before coming to her tarnished end, “Gee, isn’t it nice the way they fix it up at night? It’s really beautiful.”