Normandy invasion
It was a case of life imitating art.
When writing my 2017 sequel to Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead, I had to decide what my protagonist Dallas Green would do next. In the first novel he made a life-changing journey to Mexico as a teenager. Where would I send him in his late twenties? Europe seemed like a good choice. Since Dallas was all about making choices and having adventures that I didn’t, I thought it would be cool to send him to a film festival.
I immediately thought of Cannes since I have always had a fascination with that event, but it was the wrong time of year for the overall plot. Besides, what would Dallas be doing at a French film festival when he doesn’t know French? Then it hit me. For the past half-century there has been a film festival in Normandy which is dedicated to American films. And September was exactly the right time of year. So I sent him to Deauville.
Now, while I had been to Normandy a couple of times in my life, I had never been to Deauville, let alone to its film festival, but that was no problem. It’s called research. I educated myself about Deauville and its annual movie event and, in particular, its seventh iteration in 1980. The rest, as they say, is literature. In Lautaro’s Spear, Dallas got sent to take photographs of the Festival du Cinéma Américain de Deauville and try to find the reclusive cult American filmmaker who was rumored to be there.
Flash forward to 2023. The Missus and my kid kept telling me that I needed to do something special to mark my last birthday, which happened to be a roundy one, i.e. one with a number that ended in the dreaded zero. I immediately thought of Cannes, but in a case of déjà vu it was the wrong time of year—plus the fact that you have to actually be somebody to get into the Festival de Cannes. Then I thought of Deauville. It’s a fair amount closer to Ireland, not nearly so crowded or posh as Cannes, and the festival films are mostly in English. So I began laying plans to go to Normandy.
Because of the ferry schedule to Le Havre and my kid’s college schedule (yep, we made a family trip of it), we spent only five nights on la Côte Fleurie, but that was still enough time to take in 11 screenings during the festival which ran from September 1 through 10. After a wet and rainy summer, the area was enjoying dry, sunny weather in the upper 20s Celsius (mid 80s Fahrenheit), and the population was in a party mood. Of course, that’s perfect film-going weather because the three venues were air-conditioned. And there was plenty of time in between screenings to sit in cafés and rehydrate ourselves in all the wrong ways.
I have to say the French know how to put on an elegant film festival. The main venue, the CID (Centre International de Deauville), is big, classy and a comfortable for watching flicks. The staff are impressively attired and gracious. There was even a red carpet, although the likes of us had to make our entrance on a blue carpet, but it was still pretty cool.
Homage to a minor character in Lautaro’s Spear
We attended one of the nightly étoile gala screenings for Rebecca Miller’s romantic comedy She Came to Me, and we watched the writer/director make her fabulous entrance on the red carpet live on the big screen. The program also included a tribute to the film’s star, Peter Dinklage, which Miller accepted on his behalf.
Like the other actors being honored this year (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jude Law, Natalie Portman), he did not show up because of the U.S. actors/writers strike. (Hey, wait, isn’t this supposed to be an American festival and isn’t Jude Law a Brit? Oh, well.) Emilia Clark (of Game of Thrones fame) did show up to receive the festival’s Nouvel Hollywood prize, but we didn’t see her. We did see lots of writer/directors, including Aitch Alberto (Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe), Joanna Arnow (The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed), Roxine Helberg (Cold Copy), Shane Atkinson (LaRoy) and Jacquelyn Frohlich (Wayward), whose movies were all in competition for festival prizes. The big winner (no surprise to me) was LaRoy (the Grand Prix, the critics prize and the audience prize) which brought back the thrill of first discovering the Coen Brothers. Other winners (which we did not see) included Sean Price Williams’s The Sweet East and Babak Jalali’s Fremont, which shared the jury prize, and Delphine Deloget’s Rien à perdre (All to Play For), which won the festival’s Ornano-Valenti prize for new French films.
Petit déjeuner al fresco with Keyvan
With a bit of cheek, I dropped into the festival office and handed them a copy of Lautaro’s Spear, explaining that some of the chapters took place during the 1980 Deauville film festival. They were gracious in accepting it and even offered me a VIP ticket for that evening’s étoile screening of Marco Bellocchio’s new movie Rapito (Kidnapped). I was thrilled but regretfully declined since it wouldn’t have been fair to drag the other two to a film that was in Italian, Hebrew and Latin with French subtitles.
There were lots of other joys during the week, like having a classic dry martini cocktail with my kid in the old world elegance of Deauville’s famous Casino. And seeing Gustave Flaubert’s house. And watching part of an episode of Doctor Who dubbed into French. One of the nicest treats was getting the opportunity, after having reviewed his films Vesper, Nox and Divertimento, to meet in person and have an al fresco petit déjeuner with the filmmaker Keyvan Sheikhalishahi, who filmed Vesper in Deauville back in 2016 when he was only 18.
I have to say that I had such a good time in Deauville that it makes me think that perhaps I should actually try storming the barricades of Cannes next. Or at least write a novel about it.
If you want to read more about my visit to Deauville, I invite you to read my book blog.
-S.L., 15 September 2023
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