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- guardian.co.uk, Monday May 21 2007 09.54 BST
- The Guardian, Monday May 21 2007
You here too? Bono performing in front of the Festival Palais. Photograph: Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty
Cannes always prides itself on the theatrical flair of its red-carpet events. But on Saturday night, it outdid itself: nothing less than a free open-air concert by U2 on the steps of the Palais, as a rock'n'roll curtain-raiser to U2 3D, an hour-long concert movie by Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington. This was an event that transformed the tuxed and permatanned festivalgoers into a screeching mass of fans. We crammed up against the barriers, as the scary crowd- and riot-control police waited for the band to arrive.
Official cars ferried them up to the foot of the steps, perhaps to minimise the assassination risk. A vast whoop was finally expelled from the crowd, goosed en masse by the swaggering emergence of the band from their car; they bounded up the steps and took up positions where their sound system had been assembled 30 minutes before, under security conditions comparable to the Yellow Alert deployment of an inter-continental ballistic missile.
"Cannes!" hollered Bono, "Cannes, howareya?" And the band shatteringly opened up. The crowd were kept well back. An American producer next to me fantasised about improvising a mosh-pit of dinner-jacketed fans in front of the band, or just having his recumbent body being passed overhead, hand over hand, up to where The Edge was playing. If he had tried it, he might have come close - but only in the sense of being passed from cop to cop, to be beaten up by each of them on his way to the police van.
After 15 minutes, the band knocked it on the head and the crowd were admitted to the Palais, where we were each given a pair of those silly 3D glasses. Bono was far too cool to wear his, though I saw The Edge fit his big specs around his woolly hat, rendering his face all but invisible.
As for the film itself: perfectly good stuff. But we had all had the real U2 3D experience just five minutes before.
