La Montée des Marches

When I was invited to the Cannes Film Festival this year, I didn’t know that I would have walked on the Red Carpet like the movie stars.
I used to watch the festival from my TV screen, and always thought that only actors and film-makers have the possibility to make the famous “Montée des Marches”.
But when I arrived there, a friend explained me that, if I had an invitation for a screening after 6 pm, this meant that I could walk on the red carpet as well.
I have to confess that the first time I saw the famous steps, I thought the place was smaller than expected. Again, when you see it on TV, you have the feeling that the carpet before the steps is immense, but in fact it is not. It is quite short.
I could check that out myself, when one afternoon I was invited to the screening of  Valley of Love by Guillaume Nicloux. And I made my first, informal, montée des marches:

This was also my first time in the Auditorium Louis Lumière, the theatre where the most important screenings and the final ceremony take place.
We managed to have two very good seats in the first row of the Balcony, and it was particularly nice – at the end of the movie – to witness the 15 minutes round of applause that the actors, Isabelle Huppert e Gérard Depardieu, and the film-maker, received from the audience:

But all this was just an avant-goût, as the French say.
The “real thing” was the screening of Macbeth (by Australian director Justin Kurzel) which took place in the evening of Saturday, May 23. I was there with my good friend Amaury, and we were both so lucky to be photographed by the best (and most glamorous) “paparazza” of all the hundreds photographs present at the Festival: my friend Stefania Iemmi. Please check out her work here: http://www.stefaniaiemmi.com/ 
She is so good that we both look like actors: 

Stefania also took a picture of me for my second montée des marches, the day of the Prize Ceremony, Sunday May 24.
I adore this picture and - let's admit it - the dress I am wearing (it is a look-a-like Dior of the '50s bought at The way we wore, an amazing LA vintage shop):

For a moment, I almost felt like her:

 But then I have to hurry up, because the movie was about to start...

Dheepan

After having won two Zazie D’or (one in 2009 for Un Prophète and the other one in 2012 for De Rouille et d’os), Jacques Audiard has finally received a well-deserved Palme D’Or at this year Cannes Film Festival for his latest work, Dheepan. 
I was very lucky: for the first time at the Festival in my whole life, the first movie I was able to see was this one. 
On Friday, May 22 at 11.30 am. 
Such a great time of the day to see a movie: the sun of the Riviera outside and the new movie of my favourite European film-maker inside. 
How could I ask for more?

Dheepan, a Tamil warrior from Sri-Lanka who is sick of the war and would like to change his life, manages to leave his country under a false identity and pretending he’s got a family (a wife and a daughter). In reality, the two women are two complete strangers coming from the same refugee camp: the girl is an orphan, and the young woman is trying to reach a cousin who lives in England. The three arrive in France and Dheepan, who declares to have been tortured in his own country, finds a job as a caretaker of few buildings in the Parisian banlieu. None of them speak French, they don’t know each other, and the place is hostile, so things at the beginning are pretty tough, but Dheepan, Yalini and Illayaal, who are willing to have a better life, try their best to succeed. When things seem getting better, Dheepan’s past and the gloomy reality of their present, hit back in a bad way.
War, unfortunately, is not over yet…

Audiard’s cinema is a dark fairy-tale.
His characters are always struggling against something or someone, they have to suffer, they have to go through a lot (metaphorical and physical pain, emotional crisis, solitude) to finally arrive at the end of the tunnel and see the light. But it is worth it, because at the end of this tough path, they are different human beings. They have grown up. They’re better or - at least - they have found a better life.
From a young and almost-innocent petit-voyou that in jail transforms himself into the new leader of the whole prison, to a woman who has to learn how to survive without an important part of herself, to three perfect strangers who have to understand how to be a family and how to survive in an unknown and unwelcoming country, Audiard’s heroes always teach us a lesson of great humanity.

The director’s camera is constantly at their side. 
Audiard’s way of filming is a a pure joy for the eyes: the camera seems to caress Dheepan’s face, to follow him in his discovery of a new world, a world that sometimes looks too familiar to this man: when his past comes back, when violence takes over, when the drug dealers behaviour reminds him of the Sri-Lanka warriors’one.
Audiard’s France is not a country for old men, that’s for sure.
It is a pretty gloomy place where the mixture of culture doesn’t seem to have produced nice results, where poor fight against other poor, where the ugliness of social housing reflects the ugliness of human people living into them.

Dheepan is a movie of subtle understatement.
Apparently a minor work, but in reality a stunning one: a heap of Audiard’s finest qualities.
With that particular, unique combination of realistic and poetic elements for which this director seems to have the magic formula.
And maybe I am just a naïve person, but to know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, in Audiard’s movies, gives me hope, strength and trust.
In cinema, at least, if not in life.

Zazie goes to Cannes!

Every year, when the Cannes Film Festival begins, I have at least five or six friends who ask me : are you in Cannes?  They think I am there because I am posting non-stop pictures, videos, links to whatever is going on at the Festival.
But the reality is that I have never been to the Cannes Film Festival in my whole life.
Strange but true.
I have always been a bit scared, by festivals, and especially this one.
I am afraid to get lost in that wide range of possibilities, film choices, events, actors and film-makers going around.
I am probably afraid to like it too much… 

But this year, well, this year is different.
This year somebody has actually invited me to go to the Festival.
And even if I couldn’t stay there from the beginning till the end, I am actually leaving tomorrow morning for Cannes to enjoy the last 3 days of the Festival, and to seat somewhere, on Sunday night, in the theatre where the prize ceremony is taking place.
And this, I can tell you, is really a dream that becomes true.
Because every single year, since I was maybe 15, I have watched that ceremony on a TV screen, thinking: wow, it has to be amazing to be actually there!
If somebody could have said to my young-self that one day a President of the Jury of the Cannes Film festival (and one of her favourite film-makers) would have invited her to the ceremony, I think that my reaction would have been a big laugh and a statement like: You gotta be kidding me, right??!
Well, apparently not.
And if the invasion of the locusts doesn’t stop her, Zazie goes to Cannes.
So stay tune, dear readers. 
The best is yet to come...