Cannes Par Jour: Days 4 & 5

It’s a great day for lesbians here at the Cannes Film Festival. Your favorite girl in red stan is fully hydrated and got a whopping 7 (ish) hours of sleep, and my caffeine intake might even be slowly returning to normal (fingers crossed). But of course, far more importantly, the festival’s first films featuring queer couples are premiering right next to each other tonight! (No, I am not counting the Matt Damon one because of Abigail Breslin’s earrings. I will not be taking questions at this time) Anyways, I’ve had my fill of “misunderstood” male artists and one-dimensional women, and I’m ready for some gay content.

(in SpongeBob narrator voice) Twelve hours later.

Well, I’m reporting back to you after the gay nuns movie, and I must say — I thought I was here for representation, not a straight man’s lesbian porn. Clearly, I was wrong: read more here.

Unfortunately, “Benedetta” was only the first of the past two days’ homophobic incidents. I awoke the next day to yet another travesty: a theater that, unbeknownst to me, was a 20 minute bus ride away from the Palais. As you can likely guess, that was a little too much to ask of your favorite transportation-challenged lesbian, and I proceeded to take not one, but two incorrect buses that landed me well outside the city of Cannes. (It’s the “curse of the homosexual,” as Wes Anderson eloquently puts it in “The French Dispatch.”) As I waited next to an apparently broken-down bus, I was approached rather belligerently by an old man who took this opportunity to recite every English word he knew, in no particular order, to the “tourist” (his favorite one) wearing a velvet jumpsuit in the middle of the afternoon. A lovely time.

On the bright side, I wasn’t ready to brave the ride back right away, so I wrote an entire review while sitting on the asphalt of a parking lot.

Once I finally made it back to the Palais, I geared up for the second lesbian event of the festival: Catherine Corsini’s “La Fracture.” This one was at least made by a queer woman, who certainly seemed to know her wag around a toxic and codependent lesbian couple. But the film had its own host of problems — and Julie and Raf should 100% break up.

So at the end of the day, it seems like it wasn’t such a great day for lesbians after all. Guess I’m just going to have to write my own lesbian nun movie!

— Arts Chair Joy C. Ashford can be reached at joy.ashford@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @joy_ashford.