Bet Brad Pitt Never Did THIS In a Tux...

Read most of the background stuff on Cannes and you’ll see a fair number of references to the need for what is often upper-cased as FORMAL ATTIRE at evening events at Cannes. In truth, while you can probably get by wearing the U.S.-style invention – business casual – when the sun goes down you see a pretty high percentage of tuxedos and knockout ballgowns (even a casually draped scarf or shawl can look awfully sexy under these conditions). And while the Producer and I have not been asked on to any of the boats docked along the Croisette, if we had, a tux would definitely be de rigueur.

I do not wear a tuxedo often but I must admit that as experiences go, I have never worn a tuxedo on a bus. And looking about the 200 bus on Saturday night, it did not appear to be the preferred mode of transportation for most tuxedoed folks heading into Cannes.

We ended up on a bus in the evening because Saturday morning we learned there was a rail strike and trying to figure out when a train MIGHT show up is a risky business. (More on the inanity of French strikes and mass transit on the Côte d’Azur in another post.)

I would like to say that that reason I am unself-conscious being a Yank in a tuxedo on a bus on a Saturday night anywhere in the world is not because of my great confidence and self-possession. The real reason is that I’ve got a bigger concern… I’ve got bigger poisson to fry… My tuxedo shoes are falling apart. Literally.

As mentioned above, I don’t wear my tux to often and in grabbing it – and its matching shoes – out of the closet, I did the most cursory examination. I now them to be fairly cheap patent-leather jobs but with a brief dusting, the old patent leather shine came back and I never bothered to check that the glue holding both shoes together had cracked and that the leather upper-shoe is coming apart from the rubber sole.

This is not some trivial point in one spot on a shoe; the right shoe is the worst and the entire left side near the arch is now – standing there on the bus – a gaping hole. At any moment, my foot threatens to pop out of the shoe to make me look like Bruce Banner turning into the Incredible Hulk. Or a character from the Flintstones.

I shift my weigh to my left foot, but I can feel that one getting a little more ventilated.

Let me pause here to relate a brief conversation the Producer and I had about Happiness. Turns out that a great deal of research has been done on Happiness in the last ten years (which is sort of strange when you think about it, since we’ve been pursuing at least as long Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence.) Turns out that the Law of the Slowest Check-Out Line (you know the Law: the one that says the minute you happen to get in a check-out line in a grocery store, something annoying happens – the old lady checking out decides she’s got a stack of coupons dating from the Pleistocene Era and they’ve got to go through each one to check expiration dates or someone has lugged 20 items into the 10 item line (don’t get me started – if you can’t count past 10, you shouldn’t be allowed to shop….))… turns out this is actually the Slowest Check-Out Line Fallacy. What happens is that we humans tend to only remember those noteworthy, annoying moments. When everything is going according to plan, when the line is moving with the efficiency of a well-oiled escalator, we DON’T NOTICE. And in studies on Happiness, because most people tend to dwell on what disrupts the day rather than the fact it unfolds rather miraculously and un-traumatically most of us not only don’t stop to smell the roses, we aren’t even aware there ARE roses.

What does this have to do with our story?

Leaving the hotel, on the way to the bus stop, I ask the Producer if we might stop in the magazine shop on the corner. I have told her nothing about my shoes, feeling rather sheepish about the fact that at any moment I might begin trailing bits of patent leather behind me like an eighteen-wheeler leaving strips of blown tire on the Interstate.

There, behind the counter, behind the woman who looks like she has been there since the invention of newsstands is a small plastic tray with exactly two remaining tubes of SUPER GLUE in a small red plastic tray. The shelf is so high and dusty she has to use a ballpoint pen to coax it off the shelf.

When we leave the store, the Producer – being the kind of person described in an earlier post – does not ask me why this tuxedoed jamoke is purchasing a tube of Super Glue on his way to Saturday night festivities in Cannes. So, of course, like a kid whose just shoplifted the damn glue, I spill my guts.

As we stand at the bus stop, she looks at my shoes and says: “Do you realize how lucky you are to have just walked into the first magazine shop you saw on a Saturday night and found one of the last two tubes of Super Glue on the shelf?”

Duly noted. I am happy: I am in a tux on my way to the Cannes Film Festival with a fresh tube of Super Glue in my pocket and a big toe that threatens at any moment pop out of my shoe and scare the hell out of the kid whose been looking me up and down for the last ten minutes. “Maman! Le Hulk Incroyable!!”

Life is good.

I’m doing what most folks around Cannes are doing early on this Saturday night: taking a table at a café, ordering a glass of wine as the last rays of days sunlight are fading from the sky, takin off my shoes and trying to reconstruct them with a tube of Super Glue. Bet Brad Pitt never did this in a tux.

It’s a little harder than it sounds actually and I’m beginning to lose hope with the more problematic right shoe where the leather, lining and two other layers I can’t identify by name are coming apart like filo dough. But in the end, I’m more of less successful and both shoes are ringed with that silvery thread of still-drying glue. I ask the Producer if I’m giving off any weird petrochemical odors from this operation and she shakes her head. Now I’m worried she’s just being nice. I consider picking up bottle of cologne from one of the gift shops but am concerned the Producer will think me even more neurotic than she already must.

Some observations from the evening:

 Out on the beach, across from Harvey’s, they’ve set out two hundred beach chairs where folks can watch the evening’s public presentation. Each evening there is another film featuring music. Saturday night it was a documentary on the music of the civil rights movement.

 We stop by the U.S. pavilion and talk with several groups of other filmmakers. Like all of the discussions, I find one or two kernels of wisdom so that collectively, as the days go by, I’m beginning to develop a sort of database on festivals and distribution of short films.

 We spend time trying to board the boats but security is tight and I don’t really have any names to drop.

 Outside the Grand Lumiere theater, crowds are gathering and they’re playing Jimi Hendrix music. The cast from “Taking Woodstock” must be on their way and sure enough cops begin cordoning off the streets and we watch a phalanx of limos passing by as you get glimpses of the various actors in the window. It all seems a slightly silly affair and given that they did a news conference earlier in the day is a bit of a show for flashing cameras under the night sky. (We managed to score tickets to an earlier showing of the film and I was disappointed. It was one of those films that never seemed to decide what it wanted to be and while aspects of the set design and scenes of psychedelia were visually interesting the story is just a collection of odd moments in the life of a character played by Demetri Martin from the Daily Show – who, for having to carry the entire film as lead and center around which the chaos swirls – seems a bit out of his depth. And the more I think of tangential characters, there were just so many Types: the wacky-but-ultimately-loveable Vietnam vet, the chill-curly-haired-Pan character who ultimately rides off (I kid you not) on a white horse, the lovable older Jewish parents who you just know are going to get stoned sometime in the film… and surprise, they do. The stand out performance is Liev Schrieber who plays the worldly-wise transvestite bodyguard which seemed an hommage to John Lithgow in “The World According to Garp”… which, if that’s the remarkable performance, may be ‘nuff said.)

 There’s a slim chance we’ll have an opportunity to speak to a journalist sometime after a screening ends at 10:30, so we stake out a table at a decent yet crowded café where we battle for the open seat until 11 or so when we surrender it to a couple of distributors from Barcelona who give us a tip or two on the Spanish festival circuit.

 Finally, just after midnight, after challenging each other to stay out to see real craziness unfold on the streets of Cannes, we see a fairly large contingent of people moving towards the train station. As it turns out the rail strike has miraculously been lifted (or perhaps the train crew has simply finished watching the soccer match) and we grab the last train heading east out of Cannes. I feel like I’m wimping out on some intangible experience of just being OUT in Cannes in the pre-dawn hours, but ultimately the days themselves have been draining. I definitely have underdeveloped schmooze muscles and haven’t carried on this many random conversations with total strangers in the last year.