There’s a story Barry Humphries used to tell about going home to Australia after a long stay away. No sooner would he get off the plane into what was manifestly the same old place that he’d last seen two, five or 10 years before, than people would start telling him how much everything had changed.
“Looks pretty much the same to me,” he would say, as a worried look crept over his stay-at-home friend’s face.
“No, mate: the whole place has altered: you’d hardly recognise it…,” the friend would say, searching round for evidence of cataclysmic change before finally pointing into a distant corner. “See!” he’d exclaim triumphantly: “The toilet used to be over there!”
It’s also a journalistic disease, this determination to spot changes in events which we value precisely because, like Australia and Manoel de Oliveira, they don’t change, or to find trends in arbitrary comings-together. Does anyone really believe that a festival director sets out to pick films primarily because they’re about medieval relationships, directed by recently divorced film-makers or have titles starting with ‘G’?
Well, OK, there are some changes this year: there’s a new director for the Critics Week, for starters. And there are some interesting sidebars and retrospectives (see full line-up on pages 4-5). But the main thing about the Festival de Cannes - oh, hang on, the name’s changed, too: it used to be called the ‘Festival du Film’ and now it’s the ‘Festival de Cannes’ - is that it is, once again, what it always was: the year’s pre-eminent film festival, film market, industry get-together, celebration of cinematic culture, schlock-fest, endurance test and, just like the 54 editions that have preceded it, a prime example of what Vincente Minnelli meant when he talked of ‘Two Weeks in Another Town’.
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