ARTS
Cannes Film Festival
Blonde, pert lip-glossed babes
his week I have spanned the wepth and depth of human depravity. I have witnessed a Felliniesque vision of the Fall of Rome but in modern dress. I have been to the Cannes Film Festival.
About 50,000 desperados fill this small sea-side resort for the sole purpose of being 'seen' or at least acknowledged. No one comes here to sit in a quiet little bistro, to nibble a croissant and think about Proust. They are here to see where they stand in the human food chain. This is a convention where people aren't selling cars or shoes; they're selling their dreams. And when you're told your idea is worth ten million or zilch, it's as if a price tag is put on your self worth. So the air at this ego- fest was literally quivering with the subtext, `Do I matter? Am I important? Do you love me?'
I was in Cannes to make a television pro- gramme. This at least put me somewhere in the food chain. Without a film crew follow- ing me I was walked over and ignored. But when my camera started to roll, the sea of nobodies parted and people who had no idea who I was blessed me with the focus of their videos. Just when I began to think I was somebody, out came Brigitte Neilson, a little higher than me on the food chain, and I was sucked under a stampeding crowd and my head was used as a footstool to get a better photograph of Brigitte. (Not that Brigitte is so very high up the chain. She entered and left the hotel 17 times in two hours, before the crowds acknowl- edged her.) How the tall have fallen. This is the approximate pecking order of the 'food chain' at Cannes — in evolution- ary terms. The paparazzi are single-celled creatures floating in the primordial slime. Slightly up we have had Brigitte Neilson, the amphibian life-form ... the first fish with legs. Then comes James Belushi, Cro- Magnon. And next up we have Mickey Rourke, Homo-erectus but not yet sapiens. Even lower then the paparazzi/amoeba were the fans who stood behind barriers with cameras glued to their foreheads. Out- side each hotel these people stand in their thousands. And what is remarkable is that Mickey Rourke nothing and no one is stopping them from coming out from behind the barrier and walking into any hotel. They just stand there voluntarily.
My crew and I liberated a 'barrier-per- son' on film. We found one English-speak- ing woman and asked her if she would like to leave the squash of the crowd and walk with me into the hotel. She couldn't believe this was possible. She shakily followed me throbbing with disbelief. I told her I would find her someone famous to sniff. The real- ity of it was too much for her so she began to video the situation. Next we told the remaining French behind the barriers that the Englishwoman was a Very Famous Celebrity, so when she came out of the hotel, they cheered. She gave me her video recorder to film her as she waved haughtily to her public. Then we walked her back to her place behind the barrier where we left her filming again.
I met Didi Davis — a 'body double' parts of her anatomy appear in films mas- querading as parts of more famous anatomies. Her left breast had been used by Julia Roberts, her right buttock had been Kim Bassinger's, her stomach was used as a dining table in 'Rising Sun', for a scene in which Sean Connery ate sushi from her navel. Her dream in life was to get her head in a film. Her head, by the way, was so drunk it was lobbing off her neck, her eyes were on holiday in the Outer Hebrides. Then I was introduced to the `Hawaiian Tropic' girls. 17 blonde, pert, lip-glossed babes with the words, 'Hawaiian Tropic' emblazoned across their tops and bottoms, which were inside not so much bikinis as dental floss. Whenever the prod- uct was mentioned they would point either end in your face to endorse it.
They were owned by Ron who used to be a nobody, but went to Hawaii, discovered the secret ingredients of a suntan lotion, (coconut oil and aloe vera), and became a billionaire over night. He then married a girl with breasts so sharp they could blind you; but she ran off with Claude Van Damme. Just to spite the wife, he found these 17 younger look-alikes. He keeps them, travels with them, feeds them, pays them, dresses them, shows up at parties with them and God knows what elses with them. The girls told me they represent, `fun and sun'.
At night new life forms crawled out. I met a French mother and daughter team who were both in full leopard print rain- coats and pants which, I understood, they wore every day of their lives. Luckily, a 70- year-old Marlon Brando impersonator intervened who could translate for the ladies. He told me that something had hap- pened to them in the desert 20 years earli- er. They didn't wish to discuss what it was, but they have been in the full matching leopard print ever since. When I inquired what the lovely necklace and earrings were, I was told `chicken bones'. Then he explained, 'The ladies, like to ... how you say? Whip men hard .... ' I moved away.
The next day I went to a press confer- ence for Mickey Rourke — Homo-erectus. I, and 150 reporters were made to sit in a large tent and wait two hours for Mickey. We were told, 'Mickey is getting his head together.' (We could see him on the beach a mere ten feet from us.) Cameras were rolling as we waited for Mickey to gather his head so I went to his chair and said I would be answering all Mickey's questions. Some French journalists asked me if I was off the drugs. (Please remember the void the French have in place of a sense of humour.) By the time Homo-erectus had finally gathered his head together the press was screaming for blood. He was wearing sunglasses and we all shouted for him to take them off. He did. We all shouted at him to put them back on. He's been driving his Harley Davidson into too many walls over the years, I guess. Anyway, there he stood in the middle of a bare-chested body- guard sandwich. While his lisping Armani- suited press-person told us, 'only the therious quethtions and no perthonal quethtions for Mickey, thank you.' The first person asked if he would be banking as much in his next film, Nine and A Half Weeks, Part Two?'. Mickey said snappily he wasn't 'honking' in part one. 'It was a men- tal thing, an erotic mental thing.' Who will be the girl you will be honking in Nine and A Half Weeks Part Two?' The press-person answered that this was a big secret and they would be 'disclosing this information when it was ready to be disclosed.' Thank you. Next?' he said, I popped up, like an eager- beaver Girl Scout and said, 'Ruby Wax, BBC. Mickey, I'd just like to say that I would be available for the girl in, Nine And A Half Weeks, Part Two. But also I'd like to say that even though it was a mental thing you were doing in part one, you were fan- tastic at flicking.' The press conference pretty much ended there.
Finally I did a pot-pourri of interviews with obese grotesqueries on the Carlton Hotel terrace. I was introduced to breasts with heads on them starring in such box office sure-fires as, Only Angels Wear Underpants, and Little Orphan Fanny. A very old face-lift in a wig told me she did `We're from Gloucester.' animal phone sex. She did it for me as a macaw in heat. Then the creative genius behind such films as Surf-Nazis Must Die, and Toxic Avenger, showed us the hazards of what happens when a nuclear waste dump is placed right next to the local high school. And when I asked about his poster with pictures of girls in G-strings he said it was a political statement, — an `eco-state- ment', about the importance of saving resources. It was time to leave.
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