Prelude àlacan (no films yet) -Cannes Film Festival, 2024

Citiți versiunea în limba română aici.

Flying to Nice with the bare minimum: a luggage with like a couple of suits, swimming trunks, another pair of swimming trunks, smart shoes and some random clothes to wander through Cannes in, definitely not enough for two weeks. And maybe I left like this on purpose, with a Jean Ferrat moustache, with a backpack where I keep the other bare minimum: my laptop, The Hustle (QTAS note - The Hustle is a story by Dan Sociu taking place against the backdrop of the rise of the far right in Romania), my new poetry volume (QTAS note - The Title Is the Least Worry by Alberto Păduraru, English translation coming soon).

I'm taking these with me to take photos of them everywhere, at the beach, Croisette, at the Palais... I'm taking them to joke around that I fake launch them on yachts, after luscious consumptions of hard liquor. But I'm only joking until something actually sticks. Either on the poetry or on the Ferrat moustache, in no particular order.

On the plane I finish reading The Hustle for the second time. It's about a young journo obsessed to write a brilliant piece, but it somehow ends up being a sort of detective story, some bizarre but awesome happenings, as if that reality in there had been purposely restructured and bam - horror, conspiracies, humour, sex and ideology, but also love. But my reality isn't that. I'm actually going now to a couple of weeks of films in my backpack, indie movies that nobody heard of. Or even if they did, you can be sure we're a strange characters, very few really mean it when they go uh-la-la about the YSL Productions for example (although Sorrentino, Parthenope, sounds really dope.)

It feels like just a flex, but obviously I have to check everything to be able to make a correct judgment.

I haven't seen anything yet, but who says I can't keep a little diary. A jour pour jour full of experiences that seem made up. And it's not the case at all. Sometimes reality is so much more lit than we think. Alongside my books and laptop, in the second bare minimum backpack I also got a Chinese camera, a manual one, cuz I gave up on point and shoot after Netherlands, of course, an iso200 roll which makes me feel like meh, should I use it, because I always keep the film for a photo that's better and cooler than the one I have in front of my eyes at any given moment, because there must be one. I've also got a little lucky turtle, a ceramic totem. And a pleasant feeling about what's to come.

Two years ago I was taking a last-minute flight, I had overbooked a ticket and I had been left hanging. Now everything is fine. And I'm still thinking about invincibility as some sort of happy coincidences, which keep happening to me lately.

I've started changing my phrases into smaller sentences. More cutting, somehow. That's what happens when you fall in love with poetry's laziness. And that's what happens when you fall in love with someone who speaks like this. We function a lot on mirroring what we like. What helps us. What gives us purpose.

Me, for example, I'm imitating a culture correspondent, maybe, or a film critic let's say. And maybe I've been doing this for a while and I have fooled you, or maybe your favourite film critic didn't make it to the festival here, but I did instead. Same with poetry - you emulate a poet until you become one, so let's chill.

What I mean with all of this is that after all, when you just simply pack everything together and give it a context, that's also a story. Of course I'll plant myself in the cinema and bombard you with different titles, but until then (which is now, paradoxically), there's also rough patches of life like this.

A good friend of mine asked me to put spoiler alerts beforehand, in case I wanna be an inconsiderate prick and write two lines that pretend to have figured out everything about what the magical, hermetic build-up of a film tries to achieve over its whole duration. But my intention is not to ruin anyone's cinematic experience. So there is discretion, and my opinions are just mine, but anyway I'd love to talk a lot, even argue, about movies.

Back to the flight a bit. In front of me, a couple of lovers (or married?) with a super photogenic baby, the baby_model.jpg type. A little girl. Anyway. The girl was crying. The plane's wing was rocking her. The girl was being quiet. If the wing wasn't rocking her, she was starting to cry again. You couldn't figure out why this baby was reacting to turbulence in this way. As I was saying earlier about all this stuff with poetry, it seems like bullshit, but actually it happens unexpectedly around us at all times. Some are just more exposed to it than others.

I caught the last night bus to Mandelieu. I waited for it at Gare du mer at first, from where I used to always take it a couple of years ago, then at every other stop, closer and closer to my destination.

Like in a Zusak novel, after landing I immediately picked up my luggage and in a heartbeat took the right tram to the Nice Railway station. Then straight away the right train arrived. Followed by this strange déjà-vu feeling that I was carrying with me on top of my luggage.

The little, mingled streets were very familiar, and I made it to the key that was left in a safebox (again as in a Zusak book) almost completely on my own. The office was closed when I arrived and I couldn't figure out where the safebox is, though it was hidden in plain sight, like most wonderful things in this world. And I noticed an old lady was looking at me while smoking. Super cute. Nosy. Ok. I said to myself, better embarrass myself and talk to her, maybe she can help me. She approaches me at the same time. And I go:
'Bonne soirée. J'ai une demande, s'il vous plaît.'
'Bonne soirée,' she says. 'Que faites vous ici? Jpense que c'est abandonné. Ou du moins fermé. Est-ce un hôtel?'
'Ce n'est pas. C'est une agence mais fermée pour le moment. Jcherche un clé.'

(Zusak activated. More precisely, the Messenger. As I was saying.)

We talked for a while, basically just about this. And then the woman (I thought she was French, and she thought I'm a foreigner) casually shouts at her husband who was sitting in his car:
'George! Come here for fuck's sake, let's help this boy out!'
...

In the end I said:
'Ma'am, what the fuck, I'm from Botoșani. Come on, this is so cool, we understand each other.'

We find the Pandora's box very easily. Now that we accomplished our tax, they want to leave. George, his kindness at full throttle after his wife's swearing at him, gives me his number. He says I should hit him up, go for a beer, if I got time these weeks. I tell him, for sure. No doubt. I thank them again for the help. What a bizarre encounter, even though yes we Romanians are everywhere, that's what they say, but like this, straight away, the first and only encounter so far?

From far away, the lady was shouting: 'Botoșani! We're from Brașooooov!' (I wrote the reverb in, I confess. She either forgot I'm called Alberto and didn't risk calling me Albert. Or something worse. But Botoșani is harder to forget, that is true.)

I take out from the safebox an envelope with my name on it. It says on it 'Bon sejour:)' exactly like this, with a cheesy smiley face. Inside there's some keys, the wristband for the pool (on the instructions it says that if I lose it I'm fucked or something like that). There's also a little card with a QR code that says 'DARK DRIVER. Je suis ton chauffeur!' Well, I know for sure who I'm not calling for these couple of weeks. I'm more of a bus kind of guy. But all this makes me feel like Ed (the Messenger) when he starts finding all sorts of playing cards in the post and his life changes considerably, he ends up mangled in all sorts of dubious shit, exactly the sort of things I was mentioning earlier about Sociu's The Hustle. But whatever, in synchronicity, everything you read looks like what you're living. And then, most probably, the things you read also seem between themselves to be very similar to you.

Today is the first accreditation day, so I have been up early. Check the buses. The suits. But more importantly (and less visibly): the swimming trunks. Retrace the roads that I took in 2022. It should be like this: walking knowing that I'm going the right way, but also at the same time walking as if I've never been here and I'm learning. And that's something very tricky to do, but it's not so tricky here, in Cannes. And maybe in other situations it shouldn't be that tricky either.