Diary of a film critic

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Jenna Mahale on two weeks of films, cocktails, and overpriced groceries in the south of France.

Cannes is a city full of oxymorons: derelict cafes called Trendy Food, ugly art, a vicious push-pull between glamor and humiliation. The festival is an equation: extortionate monetary concerns aside, is it worth the pedestrian indignities—the microaggressions, constant bag searches, double-standard dress codes, leering eyes and cat calls—to live and work for two weeks by the beating heart of European film?

Don’t let the beauty of the French Riviera fool you! Crowds applaud for company logos, and almost everyone is on some kind of power trip. This industry is a chauvinist’s game, one that very few women (and even fewer non-white women) play to win. The festival experience is, not infrequently, a series of sunk-cost fallacies and Stockholm syndrome. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

5/15

My flatmate and I convene in the kitchen to book into screenings, which open at 7:00 am four days prior, and fill up in seconds. Rafa, who I met at Cannes last year, arrived at our Airbnb before me last night—it was her idea to get here two days before the official festival opening, and it was a smart one.

We amble over to the empty press office as soon as it opens to pick up our passes and spend a strong couple hours on the beach with our other flatmate, Savina. We do groceries together: a box of peaches, pistachio yogurt, a tranche of brie. More critics converge on Cannes, long-dormant group chats begin to whir to life.

5/16

Tickets for Killers of the Flower Moon disappear immediately, but it feels like people are more excited about the concept of a new Scorsese film than the three-and-a-half hour reality; I don’t mourn for long. I head to the Palais de Festivals to do some work in the press lounge. When I ask a staff member where it is, she gives me a deranged smile and says I can work right here on the floor. A sympathetic fellow critic reaches out of the line he’s in and tells me it’s been rebranded as the HP Media Center. I find it on the third floor, full of free San Pellegrino.

The opening night film is a tiresome-seeming period drama starring Johnny Depp. I stay in to watch a double bill of my own programming: Reality Bites and Under The Skin via laptop.

5/17

Like most everything else, food is incredibly expensive in Cannes. A hot plate of anything will run you around 20€, so you shouldn’t do that too often. I head to a beachside press lunch with the CEO of IMAX, so he can tell us about the latest business quarter and feed us fish, presumably. It starts to pour with rain, the busboys begin to evacuate the exposed settees.

5/18

I put on a nice dress and a dark lipstick for a MUBI x The Match Factory drinks, a level three party by Rachel Handler’s designation. There are no canapés to speak of, unless you count a tray of powdery mochi, which I do not.

The open bar doesn’t disappoint, with an extensive cocktail menu themed around line-up titles. I dance a little, drink a “Hypnotic Sidecar” (cognac, Cointreau, raspberry liqueur and lemon juice) and half of the gin balloon Rafa hands me around midnight. “This is our drink now,” she says.

CINEMA IS OUR PASSION

DIARIES

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