Cannes beyond recession's reach

Bling, bling, bling. Demand for gold is rocketing on the bullion exchanges, but the World Gold Council's latest figures purport to show that consumption of gold jewellery is down.

As gold soars to the $900 per ounce level [still well below the 1980 peak of $800 if you adjust for inflation] the figures reveal that demand for the precious metal in jewellery form is down by almost a quarter.

Well, you'd never guess as much if you walked down the seafront at the Cannes film festival. Total world demand for gold was 1,016 tonnes in the first quarter of this year. That's an impressive increase of some 38 per cent on what was already a bull market twelve months previously. Investment demand was up 248 per cent to 596 tonnes – but jewellery consumption was down 24 per cent.

Not in the Croisette, it's not. OK, Penelope Cruz – who was mysteriously under the weather when literary journalists were seeking interviews – managed to look radiant in diamonds and either white gold or, more likely, platinum just a few hours later. And you didn't see Rosanna Arquette actively dripping yellow gold. But the folk on the pavements had enough of the stuff on them to pave a couple of hundred metres at least.

For me, at least, pure gold at this year's festival came in the form of Looking For Eric. The movie stars the French football genius and former Manchester United player, Eric Cantona. It is made by one of the festival's favourite sons, the British socialist director, Ken Loach. And it is, unusually for Loach, a comedy.

If you're at all interested in narrative drive, sympathetic characterisation, and an uplifting tale, then Loach's film has the lot. One of the other big movies was for me an absolute turn-off. Directed by a Dane who says he was depressed at the time of making the film, the kindest thing I can say about the movie Antichrist is that depression certainly shows.

Moreover, if you weren't depressed before going in to the cinema to see that film, you would be afterwards. For me, the movie represents Cannes festival eccentricity at its best – or possibly worst.

Meanwhile, the numbers looked to me to be slightly down on last year's festival. I'm sure the organisers will have lots to say to the contrary, but the feeling I got was that the tough times have hit the movie business at last.

Perversely, that's rather good, as most of the time-wasters tend not to bother to travel. You end up with the usual mix of the serious players (so far as I can read them – bear in mind, I'm very new at this game) and the truly eccentric, and those – and there are still some – who go because they actually like the movies.

But enough of my amateur criticism. I think the business ethos at Cannes is unique – indeed, astonishing. It is an international market like no other I am aware of. As a former corporate lawyer with a big City firm in London you'd expect me to be good at one or two things. Fairly close to the top of the list, I imagine, would be a talent for spotting mendacity. Lawyers are pretty good at bending and melding arguments their own way, and one has to work hard to hang on to the simple things in life. I, for one, believe that there are such things as facts.

Not in Cannes, there aren't. There's a line in Shakespeare's Hamlet to the effect that nothing is good or bad but that the saying makes it so.

The perfect Cannes meeting occurs where two people avidly sell themselves, their services and products to each other, and then decide that – for the duration of the meeting at least – they truly love each other. And for the duration of the meeting, that love is perfect and true. Yes, the outside world is full of nonsense and people prepared to gouge each other's eyes out for the sake of a few nickels. But in the perfect meeting, what really matters is artistic integrity, the quality of the work, the service being provided towards enlightening, entertaining and informing the world, and the un-opposable certainty that the person you are dealing with is the finest human being ever to have drawn breath.

And for the duration of that meeting, that truth is... well, it's really true. But then, the meeting ends, and your soul mate leaves. The person you want to spend the rest of your business life with melts back into the crowd trawling up and down the quayside (if you're lucky enough to be staying on a yacht – which is in fact the only place to be at the festival, apart from in the cinema). So the meeting's over, and the truth fades. As Metternich once said, truth is that which is confidently asserted and plausibly maintained. Once the meeting's over the plausibility of that maintenance becomes a moot point.

Ultimately, the movie industry sustains some of the loosest and strangest social behaviour. There's still money around, but smaller-scale, less ambitious movies (such as Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro) are becoming fashionable – partly because of financial necessity.

That said, the traditional home of the blockbuster – the lobby of the Carlton Hotel on the seafront, was still occupied at fabulous expense.

Ultimately, Cannes shows that come what may, we human beings will always want to be entertained, and money will always be spent on that.



- The writer is a journalist, author and commentator on international business affairs