THERE ARE few better places to study the critic in action than the Cannes Film Festival. These beasts are used to travelling in relatively small groups. The average domestic press screening finds a dozen or so reviewers scattered across a veritable Serengeti of largely vacant seats.
Come to Cannes, however, and you suddenly find yourself part of a crowd. A packed screening in the Theatre Lumiére – such as yesterday's for Lars Von Trier's
Melancholia– will play host to some 2,300 scribbling journalists. It's like arriving for your usual intimate card game and encountering a massed political rally.
Over the first week, certain distinct types manifest themselves. Waiting at the centre entrance clutching coveted white passes, you find distinguished elders such as nice Kenneth Turan of the
Los Angeles Timesor sage Derek Malcolm of
The Evening Standard. An air of easy superiority sets such greybeards aside. They don't need to ask where the loo is. They sit in the same seat every year. If approached, they reply in the polite tones of a kindly aristocrat making a yearly visit to cherished crofters.
At the other end of the scale you meet the new breed. Clutching yellow and blue passes – each invariably requiring a long wait in the hot sun – the representatives from freak-monkey.com and movie-vomit.com tweet eagerly in the few seconds allowed after a much-delayed entrance. Predictably enough, the occasional, more superior wise old person (weren't they orangutans in
Planet of the Apes?) looks down on the baby journalists. This is entirely unfair. Nobody puts as much effort into his or her job as does the youth risking sunstroke to get into the latest (and possibly awful) art-house puzzler. While strolling unmolested towards Kim Ki-Duk's self-regarding
Arirang, I heard two Swedish bloggers talking gaily about their wait at the head of the queue. Pity them, not the director, when hearing that the film turned out to be a near-unreleasable mess.
Then there is the great mass of us in the middle. Possessors of perfectly serviceable pink passes, we make up the thin (well not so thin, actually) red line that helps distinguish the Brown Bunnies from The White Ribbons. The troops come in all shapes.
The local French journalists have a propensity to boo when they feel a picture is not up to standard. There was a surprising degree of this look-at-me criticism following the screening of Terrence Malick's
The Tree of Life. "It's the same logic that sees people typing 'first poster' at the bottom of blogs," a journalist from a prominent English broadsheet told me. "It's just a way of getting the first word in." After a while certain annoying common traits begin to show themselves across the nations. Self-important types carry bags from earlier Cannes film festivals as a way of demonstrating that they are not newcomers. Overly enthusiastic sorts cheer when the Cannes logo comes up at the start of the screening. The easily disgusted make a point of leaving as noisily as possible after scenes featuring violence or sex.
Do they behave this way at home? Possibly not. Becoming part of a mighty crowd can often make people act in uncharacteristic fashion. On Monday they will all return to their tiny huddles.
