The Cannes Diaries: glamorous great pretenders descend on the Cote d’Azur to sprinkle empty promises like fairy dust

This May I attended my first Cannes Film Festival with the vague objectives of finding investment for the short film I’ve written and stirring up potential collaborators for my other projects. My major motivation, if I’m honest with myself, was curiosity. I’d seen red carpet pictures of stars at Cannes, black and white photos of Old Hollywood starlets on the Croisette. I wanted to see what it was really like, not just for the A-list but for everybody else.

In truth, Cannes is less like a party and more like a market and everyone is selling themselves. There are events day and night. Everything happens last minute. There’s the constant fear that something more exciting is happening elsewhere and so it’s customary to dash around from one screening, to a mixer, to a panel, to a party and then back around again.

We arrive early on Sunday after a sleepless night and a frantic rush at Gatwick. The first thing we do is prepare for a photoshoot on the Croisette to promote our short film project. I crawl over the rocks barefoot and pose just beside a local who’s trying to fish at the edge of the sea. I wonder just how sick the locals are of the (literal) posers who descend on Cannes every year. I wonder if we’re all just background noise at this point. After the pictures it’s on to Baoli, a flashy restaurant-bar-club, popular with the yacht crowd. On the way, a four-by-four Mercedes slows to ask us if we’re heading to the villa party. Which villa party we have no idea. We tell him we’ve just arrived and he speeds off, disappointed. A harboured yacht glows red as bodies sway to music on the upper deck. The curious and hopeful approach the security staff and make inquiries before being turned away.

We soon identify the hot spots. The Majestic hotel is buzzing. My friend attends impromptu meetings inside Salon Marta at the Italian Pavilion while I sip a tequila and ginger cocktail and have my hands spritzed with edible perfume which I’m encouraged to lick. There are falcons, enormous bottles of Don Julio, movie stars wafting into the lobby trailed by entourage and an ocean of men in tuxedos and bowties standing like a huddle of penguins inside the entrance preparing for a premier. Only in Cannes do you find photoshoots and couture gala gowns on every corner. There are cameras everywhere, inquisitive eyes that follow you whenever you enter a place, wondering if you’re somebody or not.

We are sold plenty of dreams, we choose momentarily to accept them. Why not? We’re here to walk the fabled streets of Cannes, to pose by the water, to allow ourselves to believe we’re on the cusp of becoming exactly who we were meant to be. We have stories to tell, talents to share, worlds to create, if only the stars can align for us. The atmosphere is frantic, friendly and fun. The drinks flow, so does the conversation.

I don’t see as many screenings as I’d hoped. Staying in Antibes doesn’t help with last minute access but Fuori was sexy and compelling. Lessons for next year: arrive prior to the festival to allow some acclimatisation and stay in Cannes as close to the Croisette as possible because catching a taxi is a nightmare due to limited access.

I’ve realised that launching into discussions about the themes and inspirations of my writing with complete strangers is quite possibly my least favourite thing in the world to do which causes me a bit of hassle because that’s precisely what I’m supposed to be doing day and night.

The whole thing is exhausting, by day three I simply refuse to partake. I sit at a cafe and write, boldly protesting against the incessant pressure to rush all over the city and shake hands with a new person every five minutes. I hate, to my own detriment, feeling like a business person.

And then on Tuesday the rain comes down and it’s like a river outside on the street and everything begins to feel a bit bleak and hopeless. I feel cynical about everything and hate myself for being so pessimistic. I really, really never want to hear the word network again. I am rebelling. You’ll find me tucked into the corner of the English pub round the corner until late this afternoon before I go back for a nap and then get dressed up for tonight. I want to dance. I want to talk to people about themselves and not what they do for a living. I want to smoke a vogue under the club smoking area canopy. I want the music to be so incredibly loud that it throbs through my body and everyone has to shout if they want to be heard. And suddenly the sun’s out again and everything’s wonderful.

In a way, this is a town of pretenders, except one day perhaps some of them won’t be pretending any more. For most, a good imitation is all they’ll ever achieve. But then, the distance between delusion and reality is a small matter of external agreement and ultimately that’s no real matter at all, if you have the funds. Or so some people seem to think.

There are the people who buy their way in. To the red carpets and A-list events and dinners. Fairly easy to spot, there’s something overeager about them and many of the gowns are utterly grotesque. Movie stars, or their accoutrements, to an extent are imitable. Good taste, sadly, is not.

There is something that can’t be bought, something truly priceless. Creative fire, passion, inspiration. Things which at times the very world we live in seems designed to beat out of us. It’s this creative passion, this love for the art-form which separates the pretenders from the aspiring and once you realise that, it becomes easy to tell the two groups apart.

During the festival, we are issued stark warnings by taxi drivers and waiters not to accept invitations to yacht parties, to watch our drinks. There’s a desperation here and wherever there’s desperation there’s inevitable darkness. The contrast makes Cannes ripe for inspiration, there are so many stories unfolding in the dark corners, horror stories, gilded and bejewelled.

The wheel spins on and on. More people, more stories, more hoping. It’s like an ocean. I am tentative, I don’t need this. The film I’ve written is a passion project for me, a new challenge. I feel for the people whose hearts lie here. I hope, for the sake of the talented and dedicated that I meet, that the industry has retained some thread of meritocracy. I don’t know much what to believe. I’m frightened by how much of anything is pure luck and nepotism.

That being said, I do make new friends. I discover there’s a crowd of people who come to Cannes every year for the parties, who have no connection to the film industry whatsoever, and they’re incredibly welcoming to anyone who wants to partake in their general gaiety, adopting people as they go on from party to party, on and on until dawn. I think to myself that it’s attractive, a life on the periphery, close enough to bask in the second hand glow but safe from the sting, the rejection of pursuing a life in the arts. Possibilities unfurl themselves before me and I don’t take any of them. The party crowd moves on to St Tropez and then to Monaco the world keeps spinning and nearly every promise is forgotten. Ten years ago perhaps I wouldn’t have come home. I had no fear then. I would have followed down the yellow brick road indefinitely. Now I know that not all that glitters is gold and there’s a lot to be said for going to bed whenever one feels like it.

I find myself on the precipice, a turning point, the edge of something. It’s all changing. The next book I write, if I write it, will not be for a while, and it will be vastly different from my previous two. I’m entering the world again in a new way. It’s time to forget that I’m a writer and an artist and time to become a person again. I’m losing faith. Sometimes I regret ever having pursued this life at all. This industry is unbearably disingenuous and hardly ever fair, but then again, neither is life. I don’t know. Perhaps I’m more sensitive than I used to be or more cynical or maybe simply tired. It feels like publicly sharing my work is a violation of myself. I feel cheap. I feel like I’ve betrayed myself, my privacy, the sacredness of my own thoughts and feelings, spilled my heart on the page for nothing. I would like to gather up all the lost parts of myself and put them back but I can’t.

I have grand dreams for myself but I’ve realised that they must come true in the right way or not at all. If you want me, you’ll have to find me. I don’t need anything from anybody anymore and I won’t sing for my supper. In a sense, this is the end.

I sincerely miss reading and writing for the sheer joy, the rabbit holes I’d go down without a single thought of how to package my findings into a neatly commercial package with a price tag stamped on top. It used to be everything for me. Writing was an oasis from the coldness of a lonely world. I found so much beauty in it and in myself. But now that it’s like a job for me the honesty in the process disappears. Nothing rings with truth. ‘Is this what you want from me?’

I would prefer to be a writer nobody reads. I am prepared to be utterly unreasonable. And as for Daughters, I’ll make a beautiful film if I’m given the freedom and the budget to make one. Otherwise I won’t do it. To gain the world and lose one’s soul? What kind of existence is that? One that drains the life out of a person.

I’ve sampled it and I don’t want it.

Cannes has solidified the feeling I’ve had for a while now. I won’t go to the industry, if the industry wants me, they can come to me. The shop is closed. I have nothing more to sell.