ah, it's over

It's Sunday, the winner of the Palm D'Or has been announced (I disagreed heartily with the choices, but that's ok), and the American Pavilion is slowing being deconstructed. Man, does it feel good.

Last night my friends and I celebrated by getting dressed up in our finest attire (or what formalwear I had left, sometimes it's nicer to be a boy and just put on the same old tux) and spending our entire tip money (that's another story...don't get me started) on a phenomenal dinner on this little cobbled windy hill crammed with outdoor restaurants. It was gorgeous, surreal, the food was amazing and the atmosphere was so awesomely French.

Of course, three courses and a bottle of wine later there was no hope of staying awake through the midnight screening of Chromophobia (difficult on any night), but it was worth it. A little breath of fresh air amongst the chaos of the festival, and a moment to enjoy the fact that we are in a crazy foreign country with new friends and exquisite food and an excuse to wear that pretty dress one last time.

Today they're replaying all of the competition screenings one more time, so I'm about to go stand in line for an hour or so. Standing in lines is really all we do here. One of my coworkers in the restaurant recently asserted, "Cannes is amazing when you have tickets in your hand, or are sitting in a theatre. Other than that it sucks." While I would also add "while you are eating" onto the list of good things, I have to admit that it seems like every moment outside of those three things was spent longing for them, and that there was an awful lot of shit to deal with in the meantime.

Case in point: After tipping out last night to precisely 54 people who worked in the restaurant, each of us came up with 30 euro as our reward for 12 days of working in the restaurant. Absolutely pitiful, given that we were promised that we would be making that much for every day that we worked. Clearly we should have been pocketing the money, not that there was ever that much of it, given that people don't tip in France. Anyways, tipping out was going to be the only thing that raised our job above the drudgery that it entailed (hours of being nice to snotty customers coupled with hours of sitting bored off our asses).

Indeed, there have been many monumental decisions that I have made here. I do not want to be a producer, a director, or really, a filmmaker. The film industry is indeed disgusting, superficial, full of cheaters and liars and people who are pretty on the outside and ugly on the inside. I want to be a writer, and I will only come back to Cannes when I have the coveted white press badge. That is all.

But I'm going to play revisionist historian here, because there was plenty more to be happy about here than in Japan, and I'm already in the process of erasing things like my job in the restaurant from my permanent collections. To the movies!