A respected British film publicist once observed: 'Every critic should go to Cannes once, because it is a lesson in humility.' What he meant, I think, was that even the most forthright journalists will discover just how insignificant their opinions are when faced with the massed world media which every year descends upon the South of France.
What I learnt in my role as film critic for Radio One, however, was just how irrelevant the films themselves can become in the midst of the celebrity scrum that is the Cannes 'Film' Festival. When I look back on my five years covering Cannes in the Nineties, I remember not a carefully selected smorgasbord of international cinema, but a Kafkaesque round of bizarre confrontations with befuddled famous faces. I remember chasing (or perhaps 'stalking') Sly Stallone for 13 hours before finally cornering him in his hotel lobby to get three minutes of monosyllabic grunting on tape. I remember struggling to keep a straight face while Queen's guitarist Brian May talked earnestly about scoring a new film version of Pinocchio ('totally different to Disney') and Eric Clapton fretted about whether Trainspotting glamorised heroin. And I remember weeping tears of relief when Robin Williams imitated my 'hilarious' British accent at a press conference for his after-life epic What Dreams May Come, meaning that I finally had a genuine 'scoop' - a personal, public celebrity mocking.
Six years ago, in 1998, I hit meltdown (more of which later) and vowed never to return, adopting the motto: 'Cannes Don't!' Now, however, at the request of BBC 2's Newsnight Review (the only people for whom I'd consider doing this) I'm swallowing my pride, facing my fears, and going back to Cannes, not as a fully paid-up combatant, but more as a sort of sissified war reporter.
With Stallone-stalking officially off the agenda, I'm assured that this time my main mission will surprisingly be to 'watch some films'. An entirely pleasant prospect, perhaps, but one which can still prove problematic in a place famous for provoking hysterically off-kilter responses. In the past, any films that I've seen first in Cannes I have had to watch again in the UK to ascertain whether, for example, Robert Altman's Kansas City and Nick Cassavetes She's De Lovely were really as awful as they had seemed in the heat of the festival (yes and no). Or whether it was the raw power of Michael Haneke's direction, rather than my own desperate desire to go home, which had left me whimpering on the Croisette after a screening of Funny Games (a bit of both). Nor am I alone in such over-reactions. Think of those poor souls who famously broke the hinges off the screening-room door in their frenzy to see Larry Clark's Kids at Cannes. Most of them were just so relieved to have got into that year's 'hot ticket' screening that they blinded themselves to the leery hypocritical tosh the film really was.
One way to keep a clear head is, of course, to stay away from the legendary 'round-table' interviews - an obligatory humiliation for many jobbing journos at Cannes which I will be happy never to repeat. I can still vividly remember being herded into a spacious cupboard (literally) with six other international hacks and told to 'Attendez en silence!' until the previous group's four-minute encounter with Johnny Depp had wound to a close. Then being rudely dispatched to ask a single piercing question ('So Johnny... how are you enjoying yourself here at Cannes?') before some guy from the Netherlands started rambling on about an Eighties TV programme which, it turned out, Depp wasn't actually in. By which time, of course, we were 'Finis!' and it was back into the cupboard to wait for Benicio Del Toro. As it happened, I really liked Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas, which Depp and Del Toro were in town to promote. But somehow the subject of the film itself never really came up.
Ironically, the reasons that I first became suspicious of Cannes were exactly the same reasons I first fell in love with movies. I don't like sunshine; I don't like crowds; I have no talent for schmoozing; and I don't see much need to go abroad when you can happily watch foreign films at home. My idea of heaven is a late-night screening of a favourite old film in a half-empty cinema in wet and windy East Finchley. My idea of hell is an 8am screening of a much-hyped new movie in a heavingly packed bunker in the sunny South of France. I tend to get confused, cranky, and not a little belligerent.
Tellingly, the low point of my Cannes career came during a screening of Lars von Trier's Idioterne . Having sat reverentially through an hour or so of earnest hand-held Euro-twaddle, the assembled cognoscenti were duly rewarded with a few fleeting seconds of hard-core porno action which prompted fawning applause, and murmurs of 'Bravo!' This was simply too much. Rattled by the heat, exasperated by the festival, and appalled by the dual standards which apparently rendered this dreary spectacle 'art' rather than 'exploitation', I cracked. Rising from my seat and summoning up whatever remained of my long-failed O-level French, I began to growl: 'Il est merde! Il est le plus grande merde... dans le monde!" OK, so the grammar was lousy, and the delivery shambolic, but the sentiment was clear - clear enough, at least, to ensure that I was escorted swiftly through the doors and out onto the Croisette.
Later, I would queue for an hour to see an incomplete print of Michael Bay's utterly rubbish Armageddon (not in competition, obviously) only to discover that the ticket I held was not a ticket for the film but for some promotional fairground ride. It was a moment which seemed to define the exquisite negativity of my entire experience of Cannes: not being allowed to see a film that was neither good, nor finished, nor indeed part of the actual festival. Oddly enough, my friend and colleague Nigel Floyd, with whom I habitually shared lodgings in Cannes, had an absolutely spiffing time at that very same festival - catching up with Liv Tyler, spending 'quality time' with Steve Buscemi, and making entirely sound judgments about the wide variety of films it had been his pleasure to watch. A BBC documentary crew followed the pair of us around that year, and captured on-camera our last day on the Croisette - Nigel a picture of smart festival chic; me, a man barely alive.
Hopefully, my return to Cannes for Newsnight Review will be altogether more positive. I'm older, wiser, calmer... and I've been assured that I won't have to wait in any cupboards. Or ambush Sly Stallone. Instead, I'll get to 'watch some films'. Hell, I might even enjoy myself. Now that would be a novel experience.
· Newsnight Review from Cannes will be shown on BBC2, Friday 21 May at 11pm
