“Are you eating at all? Are you sleeping? You don’t look like you are,” observed our good friend Anne Thompson yesterday afternoon, her face etched with motherly concern, before whisking me off for a hearty al fresco meal.
I wanted to tell Anne that I tend to cut a pretty gaunt figure even on my best days — but having just read someone on AwardsDaily noting my allegedly striking resemblance to Christian Bale in “The Machinist,” I had to concede that festival fatigue may have hit me pretty hard.
But hey, the Mayor of Cannes is holding a Provençal lunch for the festival press tomorrow afternoon in the old town quarter, so I won’t keel over just yet. If there’s one lesson I’ve learnt at the festival, it’s that there’s always such a thing as a free lunch.
If you weren’t tipped off by the fact that I’ve spent 150 words musing on matters of alimentation rather than movies, Cannes 2010 is beginning to wind down. Much of the U.S. press contingent (including Anne, Jeff Wells and Sasha Stone) have gone home, the hot movies — such as they were — have been unveiled and the crowds have thinned out to the extent that even a lowly yellow-badger like me can rock up two minutes before a screening and enter without hassle.