- guardian.co.uk,
- Tuesday May 20 2008 12:24 BST
Future's so bright ... Wong Kar-Wai at Cannes 2008. Photograph: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images
There's a bloke on the Rue d'Antibes who looks just like Wim Wenders. Oh, wait. It is Wim Wenders.
The talent mingles with the hoi-polloi at the Cannes film festival, it is one of the peculiarities of the place. Wenders is in the running for this year's Palme d'Or. Clint Eastwood is too, and yet where Eastwood is doubtless holed up in some fortified hillside villa, emerging only to wave at the photographers from behind a security cordon, the likes of Wenders - him and all the other niche-interest, art-house celebrities - are free to wander unhindered around the town. This is all as it should be, and yet it does have a downside. See enough of these people over the course of a week and it starts to play tricks on your brain. You start to see them everywhere.
I walk down to a bar on the seafront to speak to Wong Kar-Wai. The Hong Kong director was the jury president in 2006 and opened the festival in 2007 but is now here in a more discreet role, plugging the re-edited, definitive version of his 1994 martial arts movie Ashes of Time. I'm sitting at a table when a sharply-dressed, venerable old man wanders past. He looks the absolute spit of Gore Vidal. I perform a comedy double-take, but I'm fairly sure it can't be Gore Vidal. I vow that I won't get fooled again.
Minutes later we're talking with Wong and a man strolls by with a small entourage in tow. He is wearing sunglasses and flashing a self-satisfied smile. I mentally file him as an idiot. He looks a bit like Jude Law.
The entourage swells. More and more people are trundling across to talk to this guy. He takes a seat at an adjacent table, shakes a few hands and maintains his perma-smile. Someone wheels a camera over and the guests pull up their chairs. By this point the noise is so intense I can barely hear what Wong is saying. What is the fascination with this bozo? What's with the smiling? The fact that you look a bit like Jude Law doesn't actually make you Jude Law, I want to tell him. But all at once I'm not so certain.
The sirens are wailing outside the window as the town gears up for another night. Outside on the street a passer-by is whistling the Indiana Jones theme tune. Enough already; it screened on Sunday; it's been and gone. Slowly, imperceptibly, the festival has entered its final straight.
