Drifting Apart

FOR THE LAST 19 YEARS OF MY life, I’ve traveled to the Cannes International Festival of Film, in one capacity or another. Every year, when I come home, I’m asked about the festival and how it was, and I confess that I never really know what to say. In the reports published annually in this magazine, various writers including myself have attempted to enumerate and describe the inconveniences and annoyances and humiliations, small and large, that are simply part of the Cannes “experience,” in addition to the festival’s general atmosphere of listlessness, and exhaustion. “Oh, I feel so sorry for you…” people say in response. “Did they make you go to the south of France to watch movies? Sounds terrible…”

Of course it’s unseemly to complain about going to the Riviera to watch new movies by some of the world’s greatest filmmakers (never mind that we could just as well be watching them in a mall in Bismarck, North Dakota). But the usual frustrations aside, there is now something a little sad about Cannes. A local restaurateur told my friends and me that his festival business is down 40 percent from what it was in 2012, a shocking statistic. The festival has felt less and less populated over the past few years and there is a growing air of desperation in all