The Circuit

No one tells you what Cannes is really like. Or maybe it's that no one really listens when you tell them. Celebrities, red carpet, Croisette, glamour, parties, blah blee bloo. All that is true -- I still remember standing next to Catherine Zeta-Jones in the Carlton Hotel elevator and thinking, Damn, she really is that beautiful -- but the problem is once people hear stuff like that, they zone out on the rest.

And the truth is, Cannes is nuts. For everyone. Sometimes it's funny-nuts and sometimes it's hysteria-nuts, the kind where you put your head between your knees and take five deep breaths and then five more and wonder if you can order a breakfast kir.

The first time I attended the Cannes Film Festival, in 1999, was head-between-the-knees-nuts, starting when the airline lost my luggage. Said luggage contained the formalwear required to enter the Palais Des Festivals, where (my editor had already informed me) I was still assigned to cover the opening ceremonies that night.

Poor me, I was forced to go shopping in Cannes when the dollar was still strong. So I went to Galleries Lafayette and bought a bunch of clothes for very little money, including a long sundress that looked fancy when you squinted.

However, to judge by the saleswomen who reacted with alarm, disdain and ooh-la-las, there isn't enough money in Cannes to become well shod when you have size 12 feet.

Size 12 isn't small in America, either, so I was resourceful enough to look for men's shoes. Turns out that, while French men are known to be fastidiously well dressed, their footwear is fairly butch. The closest I came to something to wear with my brownish sundress was a pair of black leather flip-flops, the sort of thing Archie Bunker might have worn if he lived in Lille.

That night I shuffle-walked down the Croisette toward the Palais, trying to keep my feet inside my too-wide sandals. I pushed my way through the crowd in search of a press entrance and couldn't find one, because there is no press entrance; the only way is up the red carpet. At that point, I realized that my sundress looked like an ambitious tablecloth and I could have done better to wear empty Kleenex boxes on my feet.

The security guard agreed. When I showed my program ticket to gain carpet access, he looked at my shoes and said, "Non."

"Sil vous plait," I said, thereby exhausting my French. Ticket; shoes. "Non." Ticket; shoes. "Non."

By now I was sil-vous-plaiting myself into a panic attack, but he was having none of it. "Your shoes," he said, pointing to my painted toenails. (Didn't they count for something?) "They are not right!"

He was right. So, when he turned to look at someone else's ticket, I slipped behind him and ran inside the theater.

And the moral of story is... well, I don't really do morals, especially not in Cannes. This is the festival where people will light themselves on fire to promote a movie. And I still don't dress very well. But I promise to do my best to bring you the real Cannes in all of its glamorous, tacky, absurd and otherwise amusing glory. In other words: I'll tell you what Cannes is really like. In the meantime, my name is Dana Harris. And, through May 25, I'll be your narrator at Fest Central. Bonjour and howdy.