Why the Cannes Film Festival Is the Perfect Setting for ‘The White Lotus’ Season 4
In my experience, the Cannes Film Festival is a place of jarring contradictions. In the same humid evening, you can ascend the ginormous red carpet of the Palais des Festivals into the premiere of a devastating drama about wealth inequality, tearfully applaud for 15 minutes in your strictly-enforced tux, and later find yourself at a bafflingly expensive afterparty where the tables are stacked with 67 shades of macaroons, Veuve flowing on an infinite tap. The beleaguered local waiting staff look like they resent the very fiber of your being, and if you’ve even a glimmer of self-awareness, it’s hard not to agree with them. Film journalists and student enthusiasts who have maxed out their credit cards to stay in ludicrously overpriced AirBnBs, crammed seven-a-room like corpses in a morgue, rub shoulders with ultra-wealthy oligarchs whose dick-measuring mega yachts loom larger than a row of IMAX screens. It’s intoxicating. It’s fun. You’ll never feel more broke. There aren’t many places that stand as such a profound symbol of the chasm between rich and poor as the …
