Moods The big picture TEXT Frédéric Mercier Cannes in May is not just about cinema. What really makes the festival tick is everything that you can’t see, everything that goes on around the event and affects the way you react to the films. What’s off-camera at Cannes are all those evocative names belonging to a certain Provence—that of Jean Giono, not of Marcel Pagnol, which is quite different: the Corniche d’Or and the stark alabaster rocks, the nid d’aigle (cliff-top village) of Gourdon, the Gorges du Loup, and the countryside inland from Nice, the arrière-pays, with its buchidindron butterflies and clochettes des bois (bell flowers). At first glance, it seems the Croisette is no place for that idyllic landscape that you never take the time to look at properly. And as for the films, you can forget sentiment and romance; here in the festival’s concrete “bunker,” it’s the world they’re talking about and showing us. Cinema is a battle. Yet during downtime, in between screenings, sentiments resurface in the conversations and discussions and fleeting encounters. Festival-goers constantly complain that time flies at Cannes, that you see too many films and never have enough time to spend with people, but just ask around and you’ll find that there’s always a spring friendship that’s budded and blossomed during the festival. On the first day of my first Cannes, I met my best friend, who is now my son’s godfather. Like me, he was waiting between two films, looking at his program and pondering the desire to give it all up, to leave everything behind, to go gather bluebells in the countryside and see the last works that Nicolas de Staël painted before he died in Antibes. Someday someone should film the festival from the inside as well as from the outside, capture its inner vibrations and ambient mythologies, and capture the sense that Cannes just wouldn’t be the center of the film world without the sylph of Provence. 26