FILM FESTIVAL: If it's May, it must be Cannes - at least for Michael Dwyer, now at his 21st festival. Along the way he's picked up a thing or two on how to survive festival fever even though he has still not managed to get a suntan during all these years of pilgrimage to the south of France
Attending the Cannes Film Festival every year is an experience akin to that of the weatherman played by Bill Murray in the clever comedy, Groundhog Day, in which he relives one day over and over again, refining the details of his life as he wades through a cycle of increasingly familiar events. At Cannes, the dramatis personae, the 20,000-plus delegates, change gradually over the years, and the quality of the movies varies from year to year, but mostly it's a case of plus ça change.
The only truly significant change is that the promiscuity and adultery - which played such a regular role in late-night Cannes partying - has wound down somewhat, and delegates are now more likely to exchange business cards rather than bodily fluids at the end of the night.
Like the weatherman in Groundhog Day, one learns a little with every repetition of the Cannes cycle: how to deal with the ever-grinding wheels of the festival bureaucracy; who's efficient to deal with and who isn't; who's entertaining company and who's to be avoided at all costs; and where to get good food and not be ripped off.
Next Wednesday evening, the Croisette, the main thoroughfare of the Cote d'Azur town, will be lined with curious onlookers as the 55th Cannes Film Festival opening ceremony gets under way. The steps leading up to the Festival Palais will be covered in red carpet and lined by gendarmes as the paparazzi photograph the guests posing in their finest tenue de soirée - formal wear is de regueur for evening screenings - and all eyes will be on Woody Allen, the star and director of Hollywood Ending, the ideal opener for an event where movies are consumed and discussed around the clock and where the outside world rarely intrudes.
Around eight the following morning, the people of Cannes - all those who have not gone on holiday and rented out their houses or apartments to festival delegates at exorbitant rates - will gaze in bewilderment as 2,000 journalists robotically converge from all areas of the town on the Palais for the 8.30 a.m. press screening of one of the films in competition for the major award, the Palme d'Or. This happens every day of the festival, Saturdays and Sundays included, and as the fortnight wears on and the media's stamina begins to wane, snores can be heard echoing around the cavernous Palais during some of the slower-paced movies in competition.
This will be Woody Allen's first time at Cannes, but it will be my 21st year covering the festival, and while he will fly back to New York after a few days, I will be there for the duration. Staying for 13 days for each of 21 consecutive years, I will have spent nine months of my life at the Cannes Film festival. But hey, it's a job, and someone's got to do it.
Everyone I know who hasn't experienced Cannes imagines that covering it is the most glamorous assignment in journalism - even colleagues at The Irish Times who, when I call to confirm that reports have been received, respond with questions about the weather and whether I'm getting a good tan and what the parties are like. The truth is that the only people who go home from Cannes with a suntan are the ones who don't work hard. And the parties are the best places for establishing or renewing useful contacts and gleaning information.
There are so many movies showing in Cannes every day - at least 150 - that producers and distributors feel bound to host parties to draw attention to their wares. The most lavish event I attended was in the early 1980s, when we were bussed out to the wildly expensive Hotel du Cap in Antibes for a dinner to promote the Moonie-funded war epic, Inchon. The cuisine was superb, but the film proved a massive flop when released and was described by Newsweek as "the worst movie ever made".
One of the most hedonistic parties was in 1993 at a villa high in the hills of Cannes where hundreds of us enjoyed a vast and sumptuous buffet and danced the night away to celebrate the festival première of Ken Loach's Raining Stones - ironically, a film about an unemployed Manchester man's struggle to make the money to buy a First Communion outfit for his daughter.
Two years earlier, before the première of James Ivory's Howards End, the film's producer, Ismail Merchant, donned his apron and cooked up a superb Indian lunch for about 16 guests at an idyllic villa where we savoured his food al fresco, shaded from the sun by a huge pine tree planted by Queen Victoria in 1891.
Some of the most enjoyable parties have been the simplest - fish and chips served on the beach at night after the launch of Damien O'Donnell's delightful East is East; an epic and heady open-air dance party for Trainspotting; a bash for Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, where drag queens performed while precariously balanced on the diving boards of a swimming pool; and a roof-top party for the hilarious John Waters movie, Hairspray, where retro music rocked the roof and arriving guests were fitted with beehive wigs.
By now, as the dour festival security staff polish their reflector sunglasses and practise saying their favourite word - "Non!" - the restaurateurs and publicans of Cannes will have their menus and price lists adjusted for the influx of the movie world, and as ever, the mark-up will be outrageous. That's why most of the English-speaking visitors shun the Croisette fare in favour of the aptly named Petit Majestic, off the Rue d'Antibes - a refreshingly informal bar that is a great favourite with the Irish delegation. When I first came to Cannes in 1982, I was one of just three Irish people there. This year more than 150 Irish guests have registered with the Irish Pavillion set up on the Croisette, next to the Palais.
The other side of the Petit Majestic experience is the afore-mentioned Hotel du Cap, possibly the most expensive hotel in Europe and the hideout for the Hollywood stars at the festival. This is also where they do their interviews and because it involves a 30-minute taxi journey each way, only the biggest or most interesting names make it worth the trip. It was a deeply uncomfortable experience to go all the way there and listen as a sullen Sean Penn described acting as being like walking through flames.
By contrast, the remarkably articulate Jane Fonda certainly made the trek worthwhile, as did Cher, who tried unsuccessfully to concentrate on our conversation while being distracted by a group of young men cavorting naked on the nearby cliffs.
The entertainingly voluble John Malkovich also justified the journey, but my interview with him ran so late that I feared I'd miss the only festival screening of the Iranian movie, The Taste of Cherry, a very likely Palme d'Or winner. Happily, Trish Long of Buena Vista International in Dublin came to the rescue and organised a hotel speedboat to whisk me across the bay to the rear of the Palais.
That Iranian film went on to win, even though there were more deserving candidates, but the decisions of the Cannes jury down the years have been often more infuriating.
What lingers, however, are the memories etched by the best films shown at Cannes and seen fresh, generally long before they are released around the world. I can still feel the thrill of attending the world premières at Cannes of such terrific movies as E.T. and Missing, both in my first year at the festival, and in later years Paris, Texas, Mishima, The Sacrifice, Jesus of Montreal, The Double Life of Veronique, Exotica, Three Colours Red, Pulp Fiction, LA Confidential, and last year's Palme d'Or winner, The Son's Room.
If this year's festival produces one or two movies of that standard and a few more that are even half as impressive, it will be another very good year at Cannes.
