The Quinzaine’s party takes on the air of a company seminar, glamour is dead, and all that’s left to do is to dance as a family.
As the years go by, the opening night of the Quinzaine looks more and more like the party in Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, that is, a congress of anonymous party-going executives, or a CNC cocktail party populated by AI-generated extras, shuffling along to a wedding playlist – despite the salutary intervention of Catherine Giraud, press attaché and DJ who took the turntables by storm at around 00:30, in order to forcefully replace Dalida with her own 280BPM-crackhead gabber sound – on the brink of breaking into song over good old Les Lacs du Connemara* or perhaps even to gather everyone on the dancefloor for a conga.
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Everybody seems to be called Gérard. An absinthe bar has appeared; Gérard isn’t even pretending to network any more, he’s here to get hammered. For the occasion, I’m wearing a polka-dot tie, which people say makes me look like a guest from Apostrophe** – by the way, R.I.P, Bernard – and « makes one want to smoke on TV ». Aren’t we all a little nostalgic for 20th-century glamour, before the Loi Évin***? Circumstances aren’t ideal for the room to be touched by grace; Maxime, the photographer, is struggling a bit – “it’s easier in the drag shows! ». Said grace might have been at the Godrèche party, where Carole and Jean-Marc watched Judith dance with her daughter Tess to the sound of her son Noé’s band, ‘Faux amis’. Cannes parties are turning into Sunday roasts with the family, and Yal, from Les Cahiers du Cinéma, has an epiphany: “I’m realizing that the opening party of the Quinzaine is my only irremovable tradition, along with Christmas”. Maybe Cannes is like Christmas – becoming much too commercialized of a holiday.*an 80’s song by Michel Sardou, a cult if not somewhat distasteful classic of French popular music.
**a French TV show from the 80’s on literature, hosted by Bernard Pivot
***1991 anti-smoking policy law
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