A tale of two cities

On the streets of Cannes the elderly shoppers cross the roads to avoid the hobos, while in competition the earnest and the high-minded reluctantly fight for attention among the commercial and the crass

Xan Brooks, Friday May 16, 2008, guardian.co.uk

Dustin Hoffman hams it up for photographers while promoting Kung Fu Panda at Cannes 2008. Photograph: Lionel Cironneau/AP

My colleague Andrew Pulver has a line he employs each time we venture away from the Croisette - to the PR office by the freeway or the steep neighbourhood behind the station. "This is the real Cannes," he says, and he is only half joking.

The real Cannes, like the festival itself, is a diverse and many-storied thing. It can be found on the Rue d'Antibes, with its gaudy boutiques and its coterie of wealthy old women with their poodle sidekicks. It can be found in the picturesque side-streets of the old town up the hill, and it can be glimpsed in the peripheral landscape we whip through on the way from the airport; a place of forlorn car showrooms, take-outs and sex shops. The real Cannes exists cheek-by-jowl with the festival Cannes but the two camps rarely fraternise. It's as though each has agreed, by mutual consent, to ignore the other.

Certainly our own encounters have been fitful at best. Last year involved a brief mercy dash to the local A&E ward, where we milled awkwardly with the tumbledown drunks and the bloodied, broken-nosed teens. The year before that we returned to the apartment late one night to find a pair of drifters asleep on the communal landing. The drifters were OK: quietly wasted and gently apologetic. When we rose the next morning they had already departed, leaving a dusting of butt-ends on the floor where they'd slept.

But just as Cannes gown tends not to mix with Cannes town, I very much doubt that the town's various strata have a great deal to do with each other. On the Rue d'Antibes, the elderly shoppers cross the street to avoid the youthful hobos and it's only the dogs that make eye contact - the poodles to one side and the mongrels to the other. The French-based journalist Toby Rose reputedly runs an annual "Palme d'Og" contest that hands out (symbolic) awards for the best use of a canine in a competition picture (smart money's on the rampaging hell-hounds at the start of Waltz With Bashir). But the real drama occurs outside the Palais, where Lady looks at the Tramp and each wonders how the other's life might be... [article continues]