Bonjour, mes amis. Here in France, I got invited to a yacht party for an entirely AI-generated movie, so the hellish future is fast approaching. Reader, I will not be attending the event.

The 79th Cannes Film Festival began yesterday, with huge gusts of wind and lots of sunshine and, from what I’ve read, a pretty underwhelming movie. English-language reviews of The Electric Kiss are middling to poor, another reminder that if the opening-night film is a French comedy, you’d best skip it. I’m glad I did! This one sounds like a particular slog, a screwball period piece about a fake spiritualist that has been compared, unfavorably, to some of Woody Allen’s “moderate mid-period” films. So I guess it’s like Magic in the Moonlight or something. Which ain’t great!

That’s a relief, as I studiously avoid opening night because of the long ceremony that precedes the film; you can be trapped there for over four hours. But I do always worry that I will have missed some masterpiece, even though that has never been the case in my experience. Festivalgoers have come to expect that Cannes’s first film will be bad, so no one is interpreting this opening whimper as an ominous portent of things to come. It’s just tradition, and hope is still in the air. 

There were a few cocktail events on Tuesday afternoon, kick-off festivities hosted by the likes of PR group DDA and a Uruguayan film festival looking to raise its international profile. (It’s the José Ignacio International Film Festival, for the record, and I was happy to be invited aboard the boat they rented for the occasion.) There were far more people I knew at the DDA event, held at the Carlton hotel’s beach club. I compared notes with colleagues about what we managed to see ahead of the fest, and it seems like there are some compelling films coming my way. Much to my relief, I heard good things about James Gray’s film Paper Tiger, one of my most anticipated titles.