Crazy Cannes

Mark Mainz / AP

Surrounded by acres of pines and jasmine, overlooking a rocky headland of the Mediterranean, the Hotel du Cap is one of the world’s most luxurious hotels. But until a few years ago it didn’t take credit cards. The Cap, which served as a Vichy headquarters during the Nazi occupation, came to favour the kind of clients who travel with wads of cash. Half an hour up the coast from Cannes, it’s where stars and moguls like to stay when they come to the festival, far from madding crowd. Journalists used to be banned. Once I showed up there for a rendezvous with actor Donald Sutherland and found him waiting anxiously in the parking lot, petrified that I’d tell the front desk I was there to do an interview.

Well, times have changed. The Cap now takes plastic. And Hollywood studios shuttle journalists in from Cannes for press junkets. Last week, as cold gusts of rain blew in from the Mediterranean, where yachts the size of monster homes bobbed offshore, Michael Douglas held court in a seaside cabana, musing about the second coming of Gordon Gekko—a man with a money clip who would feel right at home at the Cap.
Douglas was in Cannes for the premiere of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which begins with Gekko broke and alone after eight years in prison for insider trading. Looking fresh-faced in a white linen suit, pink shirt and ball cap, Douglas says he was shocked that his Oscar-winning performance in the original Wall Street (1987) made the corrupt Gekko a hero to real-life traders and that “greed is good” became their rallying cry. “I would talk to all these young M.B.A. students who just worshipped Gordon,” said the 65-year-old actor-producer, nursing a coffee laced with Sambuca. “And I felt really weird. I never got it—except when you look at all the trouble today. After 22 years, those M.B.A. guys are probably running the companies now.”

The movie won’t be released until September, but Douglas, already in full promotional mode, gamely parried all manner of questions. A Scandinavian scribe asked how he could drink alcohol after all he’s been through. “Rehab was 25 years ago,” said Douglas, looking at her as if she were from Mars. A German man asked if he’d do another Basic Instinct movie. Another baffled look. “You want to see my saggy ass?”

But the actor warmed to questions about playing Liberace in the upcoming biopic by Steven Soderbergh, with Matt Damon cast as his young lover—Matt Damon who narrates Countdown To Zero, a terrifying and mesmerizing new documentary about the prospect that we’ll all be vaporized by nuclear weapons. Which just happens to provide ammunition for Douglas in his role as the UN’s poster boy for nuclear disarmament. In Cannes, you don’t have to be Oliver Stone to mount a conspiracy theory. This is the Riviera retreat of the Hollywood mafia, so you see connections around every corner.

Money Never Sleeps drew mixed reviews but generated plenty of buzz—reinforced by Charles Ferguson’s excoriating documentary exposé of high finance called Inside Job. And Stone’s morality tale of money gone mad seemed richly emblematic, of both the zeitgeist and the festival itself.

Not unlike Wall Street, Cannes is a crazed casino, a bubble of celebrity and art inflated by wild dreams and over-leveraged ambition. This year, however, its lustre was a bit low-key. The Wall Street sequel and Robin Hood, both unveiled safely out of competition, were the only studio pictures in a program dominated by art-house fare. Some stars, such as Sharon Stone, cancelled, nervous about getting stuck on the wrong side of a volcanic ash cloud.

There’s also a growing sense that while Cannes remains the high altar for auteur cinema, the balance of power has shifted to the Toronto festival, which, in tandem with Venice, launches the fall awards season. Even Cannes director Thierry Frémault lamented the absence of certain films, such as the next as-yet-untitled offering from Terrence Mallick (The Thin Red Line).

Yet Cannes will always be cinema’s magic kingdom. There is no more spectacular, or precarious, place to launch a film than the red stairs of the Palais. This year the festival attracted royalty ranging from Mick Jagger to Queen Noor of Jordan, legends like Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, and incandescent young writer-director-actors such as 21-year-old Quebec prodigy Xavier Dolan. Cannes serves as a global bazaar of talent, a stock exchange of art and commerce where deals are struck, careers rise and fall, and the strangest bedfellows share the red carpet.