To my way of thinking, most film festivals generally fall into two categories. They’re either cotillions of pale, anorak-wearing, trainspotter-looking film guppies; or they’re teeming scrums of beefy men wearing the dark-suit-and-T-shirt combination favored by Eastern European bodyguards. The Cannes Film Festival is different. Inasmuch as it is held in May in the South of France, the weather is considerably more temperate than at the high-altitude festivals, so the anoraks are replaced by linen jackets. And those men in dark suits and T-shirts actually are Eastern European bodyguards.
The festival, now celebrating its 76th year, was a post–World War II confection that was founded to compete with the esteemed Venice Film Festival, which had been launched by Giuseppe Volpi, in 1932, as a sort of adjunct to the Biennale, which was established almost 40 years earlier.
