Cannes Day One

Stephen arrives an hour early and wakes me up...at 11:10 a.m. There goes my plan to get up at 8 a.m. and prepare for doing that for the next two weeks. I have a wound on my face right by my nose -- that must have been a restless sleep indeed. We wander around, getting our badges and bags, checking out the press room, going to FNAC and getting our mobile phone sim cards, some extra keys for the apartment and so on. Stephen is getting married and talks about the odd feeling of registering for gifts -- basically you go to Bloomingdales or Tiffany's or whatever and they give you a "zap gun." You take it and wander around the store and zap the UPC code of anthing you like. Like most men, Stephen feels very odd about telling people what you want them to buy. Like most women, his fiance doesn't think twice. He also talks about Wayne-Williams, a Manhattan store that is "super preppie" with really odd items that you won't find anywhere else. When they go to register there, there is no zap gun. Most items don't even have UPC codes. A little old lady follows them around, writing down the items they like in longhand in a little book. Very preppie indeed. And as we're walking home, Stephen points out his favorite store at Cannes. Now it's my favorite too. It's called:
ARMURERIE COUETELLERIE CHIEN

Yes, it's a store with weapons, cutlery and accessories for dogs. Clearly these are the three passions of the owners. Inside you can find rows and rows of scissors (very sharp scissors, I imagine), forks, spoons, many many knives, a wall of swords, some ancient rifles and yes, dog collars and pet toys for your mutt. Presumaby hunting dogs are the most prized of all. Surely no other store in the world has quite this combination of items. Tonight: The Da Vinci Code, which is 2 and a half hours, or to put it another way, half an hour longer than it should be. I point out to Stephen my thought of the affinity between "A Beautiful Mind" and "Da Vinci Code." Both have to illustrate abstract thought and mathematical formula and I think they'd be very wise to use the same approach of numbers and letters floating onscreen and lighting up and rearranging when the code is broken or an insight is made.