Authors: Al Clark
More importantly, he loves the script. In the decade since he used to have sex with a female friend of mine in taxis, he has become, I am told, more overtly gay, but for us this is neither an asset nor a liability. He is palpably excited by the prospect of playing the most complex role in the film, and he has many entertaining and imaginative ideas about how he intends to approach it.
There is a problem, however. He is concerned about having Jason Donovan as his co-star. He couches this in the customary euphemisms, but the body language is unmistakably hostile. Perhaps the memory of the only other time he appeared in a film with pop stars (Bob Dylan and Fiona in Richard Marquand’s barely released
Hearts
of
Fire
) is too grisly to consider repeating.
We sit firmly in our chairs and on the issue. Before making a conclusive offer, we insist that at least he meets Jason Donovan the following week to see if there is any combustion between them. He agrees, explaining he has a deadline for accepting the lead in an Italian porn movie — to be directed by the caliph of carnality, Tinto Brass — which he can probably extend until the last day of Cannes, but no later. Would he rather be a porn star or a drag star, we ask him as we part
company and the people at the surrounding tables pretend to ignore us. We already know the answer, but we are not prepared to sacrifice another actor to hear it.
That evening we are reminded of the crucial nature of casting when we see David Thewlis’ riveting performance in Mike Leigh’s
Naked.
As Stephan and I approach the Palais, there is a tremendous clamour and I contemplate for a moment how the power of the director has escalated to a point where a respected but not especially renowned one can be given this kind of reception before his film has even been shown. Then a few metres ahead we see Arnold Schwarzenegger. The rubber colossus has become a wax dummy, the smile melting under the lights, the arm waving on a slow pulley.
When we emerge from the screening, the inflatable Arnold has been deflated and tucked away for the night. I wonder how the wax Arnold responded to Leigh’s harrowing drama set in a world that must have seemed a chilly stratosphere away. Before the film began, we are informed, the big man was escorted through the building and out of the back entrance into a waiting limousine, which disappeared silently into the night.
*
Relishing the prospect of finding a few feathers in the poached salmon, we have decided that there should be a strategically disruptive appearance by a drag queen during the
Priscilla
distributors’ lunch at the Manifesto villa. Beyond the suffocating small talk, the trading of axioms as rigorously choreographed as dance steps, there is a place at Cannes for comic subversion, and we are determined to find it.
On our previous visit to the villa, while scanning the perimeter of the grounds, we notice that beyond the swimming pool is a dip in the lawn, which rolls down the hill and obscures
anyone crouching at the end of the garden. We imagine a drag queen in the midday sun, running in slow motion over the brow of the hill miming to Julie Andrews’ ‘The Sound Of Music’, then molesting the guests as they attempt to take evasive action behind their
salades
nicoises.
We have no idea who is going to do this. Although Stephan has brought the sequined lime-green Esther Williams swimsuit and red tights he wore for the location photo — in the hope, one suspects, that his luggage might be searched at customs — we realise that, particularly at an
auteur
’s festival like Cannes, it ill befits a male director with a high-profile film being shown later in the week to dress up as a woman to entertain the prospective distributors of his next one. (It is difficult to picture, say, Jean-Luc Godard applying himself to this with much conviction.)
Dismissing the idea of encouraging the guests themselves to wear drag, we research the local transvestite scene. Our check list is nonnegotiable: she must be able to speak English, be responsive to direction, be available for an hour of rehearsal the following morning and be lip-synchingly familiar with at least one of the songs Stephan will suggest. And, consonant with our budget, she must come cheaply.
Grant Lee has arrived in Cannes with a felicity of timing he may never exceed. He and Stephan return from a rapid round of the relevant clubs with only one marginal contender for what is, uniquely in this setting, a role nobody appears to want. Our putative star is demanding one thousand dollars for two hours’ work, and with the Saturday night she has ahead of her it is unlikely that she will show up at the villa in a state to do much more than be sick over the distributors. There is only one solution at this late hour: Grant will go far beyond his brief as a trainee producer and become a drag queen, which we feebly attempt to convince him is what all producers fundamentally are.
Grant has not done this before. Having risen early to examine his outfit and practise miming to a Donna Summer song swiftly chosen from Stephan’s cassette bag, he comes over for breakfast to discuss wigs and, more pressingly, where they might be found on a Sunday morning. The hotel concierge makes a number of calls, none of them successful. There is one last resort: a nearby joke shop, open on Sundays, which carries a limited selection of wigs among the stink bombs and the whoopee cushions. We select a hideous pink Afro, a refugee from some cross-dressing mutation of
Shaft.
We can hardly believe our luck.
Shortly after noon under a perfect Côte d’Azur sky, overlooking the bay still presided over by the inflatable Arnold Schwarzenegger with his flaccid cucumber, the turn-out is a little disappointing but the mood is buoyant. At some point between the asparagus tips and the raspberries, as I attempt to describe the movie to a reporter from
Film
Francais,
it happens: the music starts and Grant comes skipping up the hill, into view, in drag. There is no more effective way of concealing one’s own embarrassment than to engender it in others, and as he struts towards the tables Grant — unidentified by many of those present — begins to fix his attention on the luckless individuals on whom he will linger a vital few seconds too long, leaving them shrinking from his attention. Miming to a disco song whose dance mix runs for what feels like several years, he threatens for a moment to lose his concentration, without which the whole pantomime will fall apart. But he struggles through to the end, running with a triumphant leap back down the hill and out of sight as the song fades. There is much applause, but we do not see deals being signed spontaneously on table napkins.
After a break, reinforcing our reputation as the festival’s
most tireless revellers, we return to the villa for somebody else’s party. The entire day feels like a hallucination.
*
It is a few days later. There are numerous people with whom to discuss business, but they will prove to be distracted encounters, escapist diversions leading to the moment in the late afternoon when Rupert Everett and Jason Donovan will finally meet.
Awaiting their arrival, we sit on the Grand terrace under an awning, which strains under the weight of the rain that has punctuated the day. Rupert has driven in from his house in St Tropez, and we make desultory conversation with him as we scan the approach paths from our table, hoping for a sighting of Jason Donovan. A telephone call to Nice airport confirms that his plane arrived on time: we hope that he will have instructed the taxi driver to take him directly to where we are.
We try Jason’s hotel, the Martinez, which appears to have come to a complete standstill. Elizabeth Taylor is presiding over a press conference for the film
And
the
Band
Played
On,
and the place is in the kind of disarray which in Cannes can only be prompted by the presence of a Hollywood evergreen on a slow day. The anecdotal fluency, which in the meantime has moved into overdrive, is just as rapidly declining. We begin to give up on his arrival. Instead, we make a dinner reservation and resolve to spend the intervening time tracking him down.
Another call to the Martinez reveals that he has checked in, then immediately checked out again. Someone in the search party has the number of a friend to whose house Jason may have driven. The friend says that he is on his way there but has not yet arrived. We leave a message with the location of the restaurant where we will meet him. Settling around the table under a cloud of early evening lassitude, we have completed the circle back to the nervous, vapid small talk with which we began the encounter. We consider ourselves amusing company, as people in the film world invariably do, but we have met for a purpose to whose resolution we are moving no closer, so three hours later the energy has evaporated.
The restaurant’s telephone is perpetually occupied, so I return to the hotel to call Jason. As I look for the number, the phone gives a ring in which the apologies are practically audible. It is Jason. He did arrive at the Martinez. Though no stranger to crowds, and unknown to most of those who made up the one which had gathered in and around the lobby, there was something menacing in the bustle and braying which completely unsettled him. So he left. I ask him if he is acquainted with Nathanael West’s
The
Day
of
the
Locust,
whose climax contains perhaps the definitive account of crowd paranoia. He is not.
As he makes his way back into town, I return to the restaurant. Now
Stephan
has gone. A press screening of
Frauds
has just begun, and by now reluctant to miss it for a meeting that may never take place, he is on his way. In the escalating absurdity of the evening, we have found the actor but lost the director.
When Jason arrives, with a breathless and cheerfully self-deflating account of his rapid retreat from Cannes, the co-producer Michael Hamlyn and I attempt to steer the conversation towards Rupert Everett, who has become very quiet, studying his possible co-star with what can only be described as anthropological curiosity. When a kind of noncommittal civility represents the zenith of their discussion rather than its nadir, it is manifestly going nowhere. Which, despite the oceans of wine lubricating its course, is precisely where it goes.
After midnight, I walk over to an empty Palais — which in the middle of the night resembles the shell of a Big Top after
the circus has left town — for the ritual print rehearsal of
Frauds,
in preparation for its two screenings later that day. Stephan, Grant and I wait inside the stage door until the prosperous-looking entourage which accompanies
Much
Ado
About
Noth
ing
— the day’s main attraction with three screenings — has swished past us and out of the building.
My description of the dinner prompts in Stephan a passable impersonation of being perturbed, but tonight his mind, understandably, is on
Frauds,
and so for that matter is mine.
*
Thirty-six hours later, nobody is looking their best.
The shrill simulation of unerring self-confidence; the rooms full of colliding random atoms, desperate to be absorbed into a universe; the perpetual exposure to malicious egomaniacs, mean-spirited narcissists and calculator-toting gnomes; the no-taste hustlers who use their lack of imagination as a weapon, their solipsistic soundbites masquerading as conversation, their eyes turning cartwheels as their venal schemes take hold.
All this, particularly when reinforced by alcohol and sleep deprivation, has a corrosive effect on the spirit, but it is the face which shows the evidence. Mine has a light application of Nivea. (When asked how he had retained his youthful appearance over the years of ’70s debauchery, Rod Stewart admitted that after a night’s carousing and womanising he would always put Oil of Ulay on his face before retiring. The image of a drunken satyr in stack heels daintily covering himself with cold cream at bedtime has lingered with me ever since.)
We are recovering from the day of
Frauds,
which began with an early-morning photo call at a merry-go-round near the Palais and ended, for most, with an all-night party in nearby La Napoule, at which Jason Donovan, wearing a tuxedo and an
expression of total bewilderment, had his photograph taken with a very tall drag queen. (A believer in choosing the moment to end an evening, I decided to draw the curtain when a friend told me she had been approached to produce a thriller in which the villain is a microwave oven. As it was a co-production, she explained, it was considered important to have a bad guy everybody could recognise.)
By now, the word on
Frauds
is out: it has its supporters, but it is generally not liked by the press, many of whom are alienated by the unapologetic brashness of the direction, and confused by the fact that a film so brightly coloured could also be so black-hearted. Some ganged up against it early in the festival, and the effect on the party-line fence sitters could be felt in advance. Belittling the movie as a lightweight vehicle for its star, they disregarded a first-time director both in command of his medium and taking risks with it: someone they should be championing.
We agree that the walk up the steps of the Palais with the film’s star Phil Collins — the crowd shouting his name and the speaker system blaring Guy Gross’s perfectly deranged score — will remain one of life’s outstanding moments. When one of us says how comical it sounds to hear hundreds of French people screaming ‘
Pheel
!
Pheel!
’, the Frenchman in our midst observes, quite rightly, that it is no funnier than hundreds of Americans all mispronouncing Gerard Depardieu’s name (Ge-
rarrd!
Ge
-rarrd
!
) at the US premiere of
1492.
We travel in several taxis, each with its own idiosyncratic way of getting lost, to a villa in the hills outside Cannes. Owned by Michael Hamlyn’s father, it is the Versailles of rustic retreats, its grounds the size of a small country.
Much of what is being served at lunch beside the swimming pool was grown on these grounds, we are told; from which one
could reasonably anticipate a spread consisting of most of the fruits, vegetables and wines of the south of France, supplementing a few roast suckling pigs from a neighbouring farm. Across the pool, the telephone rings.