Take a look at this: "In the glittering, yacht-crammed harbour of Cannes last night, Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor clambered up the red-carpeted steps of the Croisette, basked in the most dazzling sexual chemistry the resort's film festival has known for decades and . . "
And so on. That was how the London Independent reported on the Cannes carry-on, and other papers were hardly less ecstatic. It makes for depressing reading. I mean, even allowing for the ludicrous hyperbole, do you ever feel you are not living at all? That you are a nobody, a loser, a nonentity, one of the vast sidelined throng condemned to stand outside and forever look on as the world's beautiful people "bask" in the pleasure and adulation denied to lesser beings like yourself?
You do. Fine. It is as well to admit these things. You will often find you are not as alone as you thought.
"Sexual chemistry" is good, though. I was never much use at science myself but in the old Inter Cert I did manage an honours in sexual chemistry. We had a great teacher of course, Mr McCallister, long retired now. I remember some wonderful afternoons in the lab, bunsen burners all lit up, sexual experimentation going great guns, pheromes hopping, pulses racing, erogenous zones being carefully mapped, conversations conducted entirely in body language and the whole thing carried on in a dizzy haze of latent erotomania. Those were the days.
Anyway, the film which opened the Cannes Film Festival and stirred up all the fuss is Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. It's a musical set in Paris at the turn of the century and features Ewan McGregor as an absinthe-drinking writer who falls in love with Satine, a high-kicker from the Moulin Rouge nightclub played by Nicole Kidman (no, no, she plays Satine).
This is presumably all very well as far as it goes, and quite possibly the movie deserves the critical accolades it has already received. It's a bit comical however to see so many relatively young film critics enthusing so breathlessly about a movie apparently because it is set in a period so long gone (100 years ago! My God, wasn't that before the second World War?) and still features living breathing people who actually sing, dance, drink, go to bed together and generally have a good time.
No doubt absinthe makes the heart grow fonder, and they probably served gallons of it free to the hacks on the Croisette on opening night, but some sense of historical proportion still needs to be shown.
I am disappointed also to see how casually some writers have dismissed the throng of characters surrounding the principals as "the debauched circle of Toulouse-Lautrec." This is an insult to a very fine artist and a decent and courageous man who had a rare talent for laying bare the obscene ugliness of contemporary urban life. The walls of innumerable student bedsitters over the years would have been duller without the reproductions of Henri's colourful and cheerful work.
Few of us knew at the time we acquired these gaily garish pictures what difficulties Henri Toulouse-Lautrec overcame in order to live at all: as a result of aristocratic inbreeding, he was (as he famously once drew himself astride a pencil), a tiny, hunched, misshapen creature with a huge head, a bulbous nose, a hairy chin and one suggestively stiff leg stuck out before him. There was little sympathy for such a figure in those days - nor did he ask any.
Destroyed by syphilis and alcohol, Henri died at 37. Still, it was a full life, and his legacy is still enjoyed.
Few people will miss the irony of film critics and other observers at Cannes speaking in superior tones of Toulouse-Lautrec's "debauched circle" when it is common knowledge that the Cannes Film Festival itself sets records for debauchery every year (you can check them in the town's public library over on the Rue Saribe).
There can be only two realistic reasons for such condescension: the first one is ignorance, and the second is that the degenerates at Cannes know in their hearts that no matter how hard they try, they remain only amateurs, and can aspire only to cocaine-fuelled degradation, but never to the awe-inspiring depths of debauchery regularly plumbed with genuine feeling and pleasure by the great Henri Toulouse-Lautrec.
bglacken@irish-times.ie