There is a hill town in the south of France, called Cabris. One October in the mid-nineties, I rented a house there for a few weeks. It was on a very grand estate, this three-bedroom brick bungalow, with a swimming pool and a tennis court.
It was the children’s first time in Europe, and each morning we’d all drive down to Cabris with Mark Knopfler singing Golden Heart on the car stereo, and get pain chocolat and croissants at the bakery cheaper than at Patachou here in Tarana.
Back up the hill for breakfast on the sunny front porch, a third of a mile up in the air, we could see half the Cote D’Azur. The jets floating up from Nice airport on the left, and the looming silhouette of the Central Massif on the right, behind which lay Frejus and St. Raphael on the sea.
And the best thing about it was that, directly below, 10 miles to the south, the place overlooked Cannes. Almost entirely. And after viewing the new Cannes ad festival reel at the Bloor Cinema on a recent evening, I can say with modest authority, that’s just fine with me.
Before the screening, no fewer than four speakers regaled us from a beat-up old podium festooned with a poster boosting Canadian participation in Cannes, featuring men pissing in urinals. The headline was probably drôle, but it was set in type too small to read, and I was in the second row.
The speakers, several carrying personal water bottles, spoke mostly about just how damn proud we’d have all been if we’d seen them there at Cannes judging, just how damn humbling it was to be there with the best damn advertising in the world and how it could bring even a Shit Hot World Class Creative Canadian to say like face it we suck man.
One speaker told us how to pronounce Cannes, that two cocktails in a Cannes hotel were well worth the 70 bucks they cost, how great the sunrise looked at five in the morning before bed, and how he’d come to the realization after six happy days and nights that another speaker was (wink wink) a real French Chick Magnet!!! If the Magnet’s old lady was in the theatre there’s trouble in the bunkhouse tonight, folks.
The reel was then played for the packed theatre. Both showings were robustly attended by youngish men and women, several of whom appeared old enough to have driving licences (just kidding). Seriously, a couple of the bald guys could have been over 30.
I grope blindly, even now, for a phrase that I could throw like a wet blanket over the two numbing hours of bronze, silver, gold and Grand Prix winners, but were you to have a nightmare in which Jackass The Movie wins Best Picture at the Academy Awards, you might get a whiff, a soupçon, of the flavour of the event.
Tarantino got it right, Violence is the new pornography, relegating once-mighty Sex to a face (cleavage?) in the crowd, represented by a spot in which three New Zealand beach bunnies flaunt their bodies at us while, distracted, we allow our children to drown in the ocean. Oh yeah, there was another one in which two chimpanzees copulated. We witnessed ‘commercials’ entirely comprised of people getting hurt, or in one case, chased by a crazed chicken. I cannot remember why.
For a reason I cannot remember either, a woman threw her broach, her purse and an old man’s false teeth from a third floor balcony down onto the ground, and each time her boyfriend retrieved the item by climbing down the outside of the apartment building, and climbing back up again. It made you want to see the crazed chicken again. I do not recall it making me want to buy anything, however.
A British soft drink showed us a man crushing oranges by making himself into a rocket-powered human projectile, crashing into a barrel of fruit. One award winner showed the guy hitting the barrel. A second award winner showed the same guy missing the same barrel and hurting himself. Naked men played soccer, and were streaked by a clothed guy.
Okay, there was good stuff. It was mostly the good stuff you see here. The Labatt Institute stuff. IBM’s What’s This campaign. The hp (not the sauce) stuff, capturing the crook with the cursor. So pour yourself a couple of $70 martinis, and go sit on the couch.
The only time the audience really laughed out loud was for a spot in a British beer campaign in which a fat Brit says how he told his four-year-old daughter about the birds and the bees with a brutally graphic description of the penis penetrating the vagina and ejaculating and so on. (He also evicts his mom-in-law, and does a cannonball in a diving competition). Did we ever laugh. I don’t really count this as sex. And come to think of it, not much about The Cannes International Advertising Festival counts as advertising as I know it, but chacun à son gout!
Barry Base creates advertising campaigns for a living. He writes this column to blow off steam, and as a thinly disguised lure to attract clients who may imagine working with him could be a productive and amusing experience. Barry can be reached at (416) 924-5533.
