(Cannes, France)
There is a little mom and pop restaurant around the corner from the tiny Touring Hotel where our little dinner party would meet most every evening during the Cannes Film Festival. There were three film producers among us — two from Japan and one from the Netherlands — along with a well-known Japanese movie journalist, a young Japanese film director and myself, a small base group that would allow us the opportunity to hear each other’s colorful stories without getting lost in a random shuffle of too much conversation.
Most of our dinners would include a few additional Dutch guests, impossibly tall men who either flew or drove over to Cannes to meet our little international group. We would also make new French friends, regular diners at the restaurant, who would spend their dinners smiling at us. Our conversations would spread to their table, and our group would inevitably grow in size.
Our conversations were conducted in Japanese and English. The Dutch and I would trade translations, Japanese to English to Japanese. The Dutch would also translate our conversations into French for both our new friends and the store owners. The pace was never hectic and the laughter never stopped, especially after the Japanese began to share their exotic snack with the curious store owners. .
Though ours was an international group, we bathed in the very French dining experience of three or four meals spiced with conversation and delicious food. It was a necessary respite, a way to reconnect with the humanity that existed away from the pre-packaged celebrity answers, plastic smiles, the endless screenings and maniacal film market that was part of the Cannes Film Festival, Hollywood’s own traveling road show.
During the daytime, when the festival was in full swing, my friends would go through their stressful daily film festival rituals. Some were selling movies to the international markets, while our Dutch friend was busy looking for quirky films to bring back to the Netherlands. My own job was to sit through three or four daily press conferences followed by catch-up lunches at a beach side restaurant on the Croisette, where my benefactor would dine on pomme frites (french fries) and Cristal. Afternoons were spent combing through the Monoprix for take away foods, necessary sustenance to carry me through as I finish writing my benefactor’s work that was due in the evening.
There are so many complexities to the festival, though most people who come to Cannes seem to get lost in the parties or events. Despite the relaxing ambiance of Cannes, so many functioned as if they were still in a prettier Hollywood. One friend from Los Angeles who came to Cannes for the sole purpose of finding film funding ended up going from studio party to celebrity party in search of a temporary, rich boyfriend. She began screaming at the hotel receptionist to gain access to my private room shower. Other friends, wealthy New Yorkers , thought it might be fun to skip out on their bill after they secured an apartment next to the Carlton Hotel. I spent so much time juggling work and the hotel complaints, presenting bills to friends who refused to pay or asking others to be a little more sensitive to the local people. No one wanted to cooperate, so I ended up buying expensive presents of local chocolates and boxed gifts, along with a revolving fan for the sweaty receptionist, as a form of apology. My nightly dinners became a desperate lifeline, a way to remind myself that I was in another country that wanted to offer more than the vanity and greed of Hollywood.
Before my first Cannes experience, I was given instructions not to learn the local language. Perhaps it would have been far too cruel to subject the locals to American accent laden French. I was also warned against so many other things that made me reluctant to experience France. My own fears seemed to crumble when I was led from my hotel to the sea shore, where I stared at the blue Mediterranean. Somehow, that filthy sea filled with discarded oil cans, dead fish and brown water from the horror stories of Italian nuns back in my Catholic school days never materialized. This would be one of many unfulfilled fears, a laundry list of horrifying scenes from a fertile imagination of odd French stereotypes.
Unlike my high school girlfriends, I refused to learn French. Instead, I took six years of German. When my girlfriends all spoke of taking a trip to France, I declined. I only went to my first restaurant in a French heavy San Francisco when I was 22, and that was by force. I even reluctantly went into a fellow KUSF Djs home, a French citizen who went from the local Lycee Francais to USF, unreasonably frightened that his parents would annex me to their neighbors. A few hours before my plane left for France, my friend Conrad tried so very hard to convince me that the France was a pretty nice place.
Of course, my ideas were formed by school and news, and all those stories of the cowardly, horny, overly proud, beret-wearing French, an auspicious combination of qualities. One girlfriend vehemently disliked one particular summer school student, a girl who constantly bragged that she proudly descended from the gentleman who wrote “La Marseillaise” (French national anthem). I heard of this girl everyday, from her swinging blonde hair to the way in which the tip of her nose were teeter upwards, as if aided by helium-filled balloons.
I was too stupid to realize that the same girl was always kind to me, and we got along quite well. I had no concept of Les Marseillaise, and she never pressed the point. Instead, I encouraged her to lip synch to “The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia”, and all was well in the world. As to my DJ friend, we got along so well that we once did entire segments of our late night broadcast in both French and Japanese, much to the anger of the listeners. We played off each other as if we had mutual ESP, and he even let me play with his father’s stuffed llama collection.
So it was in France that these unwarranted fears unraveled into delight, once I stepped away from the film festival life.
It began with a blackout, where the lights flickered on and off in a tiny Italian restaurant at the start of the festival. As soon as the lights went out, the French diners would send up a cheer, signing songs until the light would return. The blackout would return several times throughout the evening, and it seemed to draw the most delightful response from the locals.
There was also the nice lady at the store near the hotel, where she would wait for me everyday to buy my breakfast. She would push the freshest fruits towards me whenever I entered her store, and we would communicate with a series of nods and smiles. It was like this with other food vendors, where I began to communicate by using what simple words I learned. The French always stood by, patiently waiting for me to complete my thoughts. Other times, they seemed to fully understand the Spanish/German combo sentences I would create.
I purchased colored pencils from a small art store, and the owner gave me a personal tour of his entire inventory. The hotel owner would always volunteer to drive me places for free, and I never got in trouble for causing a blackout when I used my hair dryer and computer at the same time.
I began to understand that all those horror stories about the French could apply to any country where the natives feel disrespected. In the case of Cannes, Americans bring in the money and then indulge in behavior that would require intervention by Judge Judy. No one spoke French, everyone had a demand or an entitlement to star treatment and the French were expected to not be so culturally French while we were in town.
Yet the more time I spent in France, the more I yearned to know more about the country, the culture and its people. As the festival went on, I seemed to slip away inside the outdoor produce markets or take long walks up a great incline to enjoy the relative silence and obscurity of an old, hilltop Catholic church. From there, I could hear the native tongue from people who stood at a distance, watching as a publicity float would try to maneuver through the Croisette traffic. Here, the French lived, quietly enduring the assault on their beautiful little town.
On most days when I made my escape, I would see something charming and different. There was the young man who leapt over the stone wall surrounding the church, coming back a few minutes later clutching a handful of vibrant wild flowers for his girlfriend. There were the two mid women in their mid-70s giggling inside a toy store as they played with handmade doll clothes, laughing as if they were still two coquettes in the prime of their youth.
When my mother accompanied me to Cannes for a few days one year, I found her hugging a couple inside the Monoprix. They explained that my mother was their friend because she was Japanese. She, in turn, immediately took to the French. She spent most days on her own while I worked. I once found her at a store where the clerk was rifling through her wallet. My mother, who could not grasp the Euro, simply trusted every store clerk to pull out the right amount of money from her wallet. She seemed to let down her defense, putting aside her tendency to view humanity at its worth, to make friends with everybody she encountered.
Before I returned to the US on one trip, I even found the bravery to visit a friend in Monaco by train, spending the best US $2 ever for a ride that wound its way along the Cote d’Azur. Each car was a different style from the next, and I sat in an old brown one with large, old windows and deeply plush velvety seats. An old man sat down next to me, and I spent much of the trip trying to explain baseball. He acted as if I were reciting Shakespearean love poems.
My friend, a pretty Italian girl from San Remo whom I met at the festival, moved to Monaco with her new husband. They lived at the top of Monaco’s grand steep hills in a high rise apartment that faced an empty French hill across the street. We ate homemade pasta dinner and conversed on her balcony, where our conversations were often interrupted by the chorus of croaking frogs from the French hillside. I briefly thought of the term “Frogs,” often used to refer to the French but dismissed it as a childish stereotype. I had somehow gone beyond the silliness of it all.
To indulge in this Mediterranean life, at least here in France, was the greatest experience. There was the food, wine, views, people, weather, culture and that slow, deliberate pace of life. I experienced it with my nightly dinners with friend. I enjoyed it the Swiss twins Uranus and Neptune whom I would meet on the beach, my dearest French friend Lisa with her infectious laugh and charming personality and my American friend Cari, who used the festival as an excuse to visit France again and again. She seemed to understand it better than anyone, never letting the Hollywood side of things interrupt her uniquely French experience, here where I also learned to enjoy joie de vive.
It is the loveliest of countries. Happy Bastille Day!
(c) 2014 Slow Suburban Death. All rights reserved.
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