Breaking Baz @ Cannes: 'Even If I'm Fired, I Stay,' Declares Defiant Thierry Frémaux; Festival Victors Dance The Night Away After Strongest Selection In Years

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7 days ago

Thierry Frémaux, the Delegate Général of the Cannes Film Festival, is propping up the Majestic Beach's main bar. The joint's buzzing, the victors being lionized after what has been acknowledged as a strong competition and selection, and I have the temerity to wonder idly when he'll retire.
'I don't know,' he murmurs. 'You know, in France the social contract is something different.'
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'Even if I'm fired, I stay,' he finishes defiantly.
He laughs, then turns the tables and cheekily asks when I will retire.
'I don't want you to retire,' he says caressing my arm. 'Stay with us.'
Fremaux first visited Cannes in 1979, driving from Lyon in a truck. Every day that year he remained on the Croisette without watching any movies 'because I couldn't attend any film. Each evening I used to go back to the highway and sleep in the car in the gas station.'
Today (it now being the early hours of Sunday) he says, he will pick up his car at the Carlton 'and go back to Lyon like I was 19 again,' he says wistfully.
'It's in my tradition to come by car… we need to feel, I don't want to say forever young, but it is something like that. When you, me, whoever, are in the screening room there is no age. No young people, no old people.'
Together we marvel over the diversity of the winners. There's Jafar Panahi, the Iranian-born director of Palme d'or winner It Was Just An Accident, and Norwegian Joachim Trier who took the Grand Prix prize for Sentimental Value. Oliver Laxe, director of Sirât, born in Paris to Galician emigrants, was joint Jury Prize winner with Berlin-born Mascha Schilinski the director of Sound of Falling, and so on all the way to Nigerian-born Akinola Davies Jr. who was garlanded with a Special Mention by the Caméra d'or jury for My Father's Shadow which was shown in Un Certain Regard.
I note that Nadia Melliti who is French-Algerian heritage was named best actress for her beautifully captured performance as a young woman discovering her attraction for other women in Hafsia Herzi's The Little Sister, while it seemed that the the Cannes bubble was cheering for Jennifer Lawrence to win for Die, My Love – Lynne Ramsay's incendiary study of the disintegration of a marriage. Melliti tells me that Herzi's casting director discovered her 'walking along the street.' She'd never acted before. Her background was in sport. Now it's in acting.
I tell Frémaux that it angers me that people forget that Cannes represents the whole world, not just the white western bit of it, and that cinema isn't just the shiny and splashy stuff from Hollywood.
Nodding in agreement, Frémaux remarks that since the origin of Cannes 'we are universal,' and remembers John Ford's comment, 'Be local, you will be universal.'
'We are not in France,' says Frémaux. 'Cannes is not a French film festival. It's a film festival in France and it's an international film festival,' he says reminding me that its official name is Festival International du Film.
'We have for the first time Nigeria in Un Certain Regard. We have Czech, Iran… Cannes is a journey. We make that journey in the selection process.'
He observes that in the past Asia meant films only from Japan. 'And then in the beginning of the new century, Korea, China, Singapore, Thailand. And now it's Africa and not only ex-French Africa,' while conceding that 'maybe not enough' attention had been paid to Africa: 'Again, it's a frustration of the festival' but 'we pay attention on what is going on everywhere …'
He looks me in the eye because he knows I'm about to ask about America and the orangutan in the White House, and I mean no offence to the great apes. However, he cuts me off at the chase. 'Regarding, of course, the US and what is going on in the world, in cinema not only in Cannes, there is no border. The language is cinema, the emotion is cinema or cinema is emotion. And the emotion is the same wherever you were born.'
I wonder if others will second my emotion that Ari Aster's Eddington is a masterpiece about the sad decline of the United States?
Frémaux and I warmly embrace and I scoot over to Renate Reinsve who's so darn good in Trier's Sentimental Value. The actress is taking a break, she tells me, ahead of starring in Alexander Payne's already announced movie Somewhere Out There. 'Not one person has a bad word to say about Alexander and I'm looking forward to working with him,' says Reinsve, although she refuses to say what the film's about, except that 'it's a remarkable script.'
Filming, she says, begins in February on locations in Denmark and Ireland.
Stellan Skarsgård plays Reinsve's father, a film director, in Sentimental Value. I tell him that the character reminds me, in part, of Lear, except that his filmmaker overcomes his madness.
Later, I chat briefly to Elle Fanning who, as I noted in a previous column, excels in Sentimental Value, just as she did in James Mangold's A Complete Unknown.
Fanning plays a Hollywood 'type actress' in Trier's movie, but says, that she and the director tried not to make her a caricature. Whatever they did, it's some of her best work. She says that her performance was aided by the fact that she went from shooting Predator: Badlands in New Zealand directly to filming a beach scene with Skarsgård in Deauville. 'It was the kind of role my character might have played, so it was very meta,' says Fanning.
Before he goes, I snap a few photos of Trier and his editor Oliver Bugge Coutté. They've been friends for years and, back in the day, shared an apartment with three others in St. John's Wood, NW London, while they were students at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield.
The flat was ideally situated, he says, because it was close to Marylebone train station, 'just a few stops to the school,' where the late agent Jenne Casarotto first saw his work and signed him. He's still with the Casarotto Ramsay & Associates agency, represented by Elinor Burns.
Akinola Davies Jr. shows the same devotion to his longtime agent Roxana Adle at LARK management. The My Father's Shadow director has been inundated since the film was shown at the festival. But he's staying firm with both Adle and Element's Rachel Dargavel.
'To get to me, they'll have to go through Roxana,' says Davies who was on a hike outside Marseilles when he received a message suggesting he return to Cannes in time for the closing ceremony.
He was dressed in shorts, T-shirt and boots and his black-tie clobber was in a car miles away in Marseilles. Somehow, he and Nicholas Hayes,his producing partner at Red Clay Pictures, made it back to the Palais in time.
I felt sad that Akinola's brother Wale, with whom he wrote the film, was not with him.
However, I shall never forget when Davies's name was called and he stood up – and stood out due to his blond-dyed hair – and the world of cinema applauded him.
I couldn't make out what he was saying; was it to the crowd or to himself, I asked? 'I have a little motto I repeat to myself when I'm nervous,' he responds, about not being alone and to be kind to yourself and others.
Davies spent most of the night hanging out with Hayes, Dargavel, the BFI's Ama Ampadu, as well as Element's Emma Norton and producer Lee Groombridge who were producers on Pillion.
Pillion's director Harry Lighton won the best screenplay honour in Un Certain Regard and he was on the Majestic Beach too and there was something touching about seeing them engaging and being supportive of each other.
Spotting Jafar Panahi, I went over to pay my respects and to point out that his winning the Palme d'or had brought tears to Cate Blanchett's eyes.
'I saw that,' he acknowledges softly behind dark glasses he's still sporting at one in the morning.
I play the room and the pier one last time. Then I hear the beat of Rock This Party (Everybody Dance Now). I look over to the dance floor and it sinks in that the world Frémaux was talking about is on that floor letting its collective hair down.
The beat that brings us together must never stop.
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