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Our Man in Cannes: The festival’s craziest moment
CANNES, France — I’m often asked what the craziest moment in Cannes is each year. This year, it happened over the weekend, during the red-carpet premiere of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”
The star arrivals began along the Croisette around 6:30 p.m., and thousands of gawkers jammed the streets. Meanwhile, just west of the big premiere, another press screening was scheduled to start, and hundreds of journalists were trying to make their way past the Palais to the theater, only to face a mob.
Then police let several cars through blockades and they took up most of the street between the Palais and the nearby buildings. So what is normally a mob scene became similar to the ending of “The Day of the Locusts,” with people shoving and hollering.
But the most startling part of all of this was that several parents had decided to bring their children to the spectacle in strollers. The crowd became so hostile and pushy that the parents had to anxiously grab their small children from the strollers to protect them. Then they tried to fold up the strollers while clinging to their children.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen locals inexplicably bring their strollers to a mob scene, so I have no reason to expect that it won’t happen again. But I bet the parents who were there over the weekend won’t do it again.
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