Cannes 2024 – We’re all a little like Marie Antoinette

Some nights have the tricky task of fulfilling something from the films of the day; some films, in turn, will never be separated from their Cannes parties. From this point of view, expectations were almost too high for the party held for Queens of Drama, due to the film’s pop flamboyance and its essential nocturnal extension. Will we live up to the expectations? Will, for example, this vintage Star Wars t-shirt-wearing journalist live up to them? If you miss on the night, do you miss on the movie, too? Behind the turntables of the Semaine beach, Dustin Muchuvitz and Raya Martini unleash a polished DJ set and sway like divas; sipping my Moscow mule, creating a dinner for myself out of the hors d’œuvres I can find, I don’t feel up to scratch – rude, borderline animalistic. Am I a drama queen, or just a party beggar? I console myself by thinking that monarchs need subjects.

At the club Vertigo, for the after-party, things balance out, in the manner of an abolition of privileges. On stage, Bilal Hassani sings “Pas touche”, the film’s hit song, very reminiscent of the singer Alizée, with lyrics that I’ve just about mastered – an indistinct flow of cast members and anonymous party-goers links the stage to the dancefloor and makes them one and the same; for a moment, the contingencies of material life, the next day’s laundry, the 8:30am screening, all fade away, and we’re all a little like Marie Antoinette. Then the alarm clock goes off.

Traduction Emma Frigo