So it is au revoir to ‘grotesque’ red-carpet selfies at Cannes

Celebrities pouting into their phones like excitable teenagers at a One Direction reunion are not quite comme il faut on La Croisette

Alice Jones
Friday 17 April 2015 16:59 BST
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Best Actress nominee Reese Witherspoon taking a selfie on the red carpet
Best Actress nominee Reese Witherspoon taking a selfie on the red carpet

Mon Dieu! Est-ce que la fin de la selfie? The artistic director of Cannes, Thierry Fremaux, has announced the line-up for this year’s film festival, with all the usual rather serious fanfare. There will be new roles for megastars including Cate Blanchett, Matthew McConaughey, Rachel Weisz and Michael Fassbender, but this year they will have to turn their phones off long before they take to their seats to watch themselves on the big screen, before they step out of their limos even. Fremaux also announced a crackdown on red-carpet selfies.

“We are waging a campaign to slow down the contemporary practice of selfies on the red carpet and the steps. Beyond what we think, it’s a practice that’s often extremely ridiculous and grotesque,” he said, with all the understatement of a man whose pain et beurre is cinema. It’s partly a matter of timing – in the dazzling flashbulb circus of a world premiere, it can really slow things down if the stars of the show are, as Fremaux puts it, “stopping every two metres to take a picture of themselves with themselves”. And if the screening of the latest Colin Farrell movie starts five minutes late, then goodness knows where it will all end. (On a champagne-drenched yacht, probably.)

There is, it must be said, a whiff of the selfie – attention-grabbing, solipsistic, pouty, a bit daft – about this announcement. Nothing catches the eye these days like a dictat on selfies – not even premieres from art-house darlings like Paolo Sorrentino and Gus Van Sant. It is the world we live in. Everyone takes selfies. If Alfred Hitchcock were alive today, he would be working on a way to take a selfie featuring a cameo of himself.

The red-carpet selfie is a relatively recent phenomenon. Where fans used to clamour for autographs, now they want an awkwardly angled, fish-eyed, blurry close-up with a star. Stars have to oblige for fear of being branded icy and then never getting a role in a rom-com again. In fact, it is probably written into their contracts these days – X must agree to a minimum of 20 broadcast interviews, 15 magazine profiles, three days of soul-evaporating Q&As in a hotel room and 400-plus selfies with fans – as part of selling the movie they have just made. The selfie is free marketing – a thousand fans take pictures on the red carpet, they share it on Facebook, Instagram etc, their thousands of friends see it, like it and soon the box-office tills are ringing.

The Cannes ruling, such as it is, targets the newest, and the purest, form of red-carpet selfie, in which stars snap themselves in all their finery and then share the image on their own social media, usually with an assortment of hashtags #soblessed #humbled #lovethisfilm #dressbyDior etc. It’s all terribly vain, but this is the movie industry.

Cannes is not a fan. “It’s always the ugliest picture of you anyway,” grumbled the incoming president Pierre Lescure. I suspect that as well as garnering some buzz around their line-up, the festival heads were hoping that this latest announcement might inject some old-school glamour into the festival, which is, at base, just a marketplace. Celebrities pouting into their phones like excitable teenagers at a One Direction reunion are not quite comme il faut on La Croisette. That sort of behaviour breaks down the barriers between star and viewer, clearly demarcated by that strip of magic carpet. Too many silly selfies and you run the risk of the world taking a fortnight of film screenings by the sea as mere entertainment; you are in grave danger of cross-infection between celebrities and civilians.

Perhaps the Cannes chiefs should be even more radical. They could ban the red carpet altogether. Indeed, for such a frivolous walkway, it has become contentious territory of late. A growing faction – Reese Witherspoon and Cate Blanchett etc – have joined the “Ask Her More” campaign for actresses who would like to be noticed for more than the dress they are wearing, perhaps even for the film they have made. There is an easier way for female stars to kill off the glamorous parade of banality – don’t show up to it. Let the film speak for itself.

That hardly ever happens, of course. The tricky thing with movies is, at some point you need ordinary people, a lot of ordinary people, to go and watch them. An old-school, elegant red-carpet procession might be aesthetically pleasing but it won’t make much of a dent in a blockbusting budget. So the selfies are more than likely here to stay. Dommage, Cannes.

Twitter: @alicevjones

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