Chocolate stilettos - just the thing for the red carpet in Cannes

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/22/chocolate-stilettos-cannes-red-carpet

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From time to time at Cannes, you stagger out of the cinema, from one of the many examinations of suicide that seem to be all the rage this year, and the sight of life outside is so welcome it makes your eyes water. Movies aside, Cannes really does afford an awesome spectacle. The harbour at night, studded with boats like glowworms. The curve of the Croisette, palms trussed up with fairy lights, sand to the left, creamy hotels like wedding cakes to the right. The red carpet in front of the Palais before a premiere, fans stacked six deep screaming for a piece of John C Reilly.

Yet maybe the most impressive thing you can see is the constant dolling up. Ordinary people totter about the town in full evening wear from dawn to dusk like extras from a prom movie. They pop to the chemist like this; they wolf baguettes propped on litter bins in princess gowns and penguin suits. Most have no place to actually go. They are simply there in the hope of either getting their mitts on a ticket to a movie or a party, or, if already in ownership of such a thing, of making an impact once there.

Many of these get-ups are high-budget productions: hair stiff with John Frieda, frocks sobbing with diamante, and – of course – Cirque du Soleil stilettos, basically just an insole and a pencil. That security guards this week refused entry to women who dared not to wear these for reasons of comfort, disability or even good taste, is no surprise. Cannes is a marketplace. It flogs movies; it trades people. Its own sell in the increasingly competitive film festival world is to be the most glam, the pinnacle of glitter: all gowns, all the time. Such a mission statement clearly needs policing lest people blow it by rocking up in Crocs.

The other day I saw a couple of black-tie hopefuls propped up against the window of a patisserie. They weren’t eyeing up the cakes but a life-size chocolate stiletto, frosted with gold, fetish lace detail piped in raspberry icing: a steal at just €33. Though, of course, for them to be of real use on the red carpet, you’d need to buy a pair.

Art to break your heart

I’m writing this in the festival press room, in front of one of the world’s least helpful paintings. It’s of a clock, quite realistic, showing three minutes to eight. One can only imagine the number of minor cardiac moments it has triggered over the past fortnight.

It’s not the only picture here that haunts your dreams. Running between hotel rooms for various movie junkets offers a strange sort of impromptu gallery tour – one that leaves you in no doubt French hoteliers take greater curatorial risks than their Brit equivalents. Often you’re ushered in front of some celeb only to find your eye caught by the spread-legged nude or dying bison that fills the wall behind them. There’s no respite at home either. Above the bed in our rented flat is an elephant the size of a rowing boat, eyes brimming with grief.

That old Woody magic

In 1986 Michael Caine won an Oscar for his role in Hannah and Her Sisters. In his new movie, Youth, which premiered here, Caine so much resembles Woody Allen – earth-tone jacket, saggy jowls, black-rimmed specs, bucket hat – that you spend the movie waiting for the next kvetch.

Woody was in Cannes with a film too, as he is most years, giving a press conference that’s more like a standup gig, squinting at the sun for photographers, doing a few interviews, always amazingly amiable and, for such an apparently neurotic A-lister, very low maintenance. For the Allen fan, eight minutes with the man, including hearing him give his lunch order and seeing him smile mildly at your chicken joke, is just about heaven. Cannes can be gruelling, with the stress and queues and lack of sleep and endless suicide. But that was just magic.