Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [158]
Considering her fame, and the stable if not completely secure financial position she was in, it was odd that Pauline traveled to Europe so infrequently. That May, however, she did agree to serve on the jury at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival. It was welcome recognition of her stature from the international film community, but the experience itself was not a positive one. The jury included the chair, Roberto Rossellini, plus Jacques Demy, Carlos Fuentes, Benoîte Groult, and Marthe Keller. Shortly after her arrival Keller was pulled aside by Robert Favre Le Bret, the festival’s president, who informed her that a solid commercial choice was needed for the top prize, the coveted Palme d’Or, and that he was instructing her to vote for Ettore Scola’s A Special Day, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren—a film with the potential to be a great commercial success. Keller, incensed, went to the jury members the next day and told them what had transpired. Over the next few days the jurors were approached one by one—with Pauline, the one that Le Bret had reason to fear the most—being the last. The end result was they all tacitly agreed not to vote for A Special Day—a film most of them admired—on principle. Instead the Palme d’Or went to Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Padre Padrone. “I will remember all my life,” Keller said, “the morning the Palme d’Or was announced—Le Bret said on the radio that the women who wanted to make some salade niçoise, they would not find any tomatoes, because people were throwing them at the jury today. Pauline got completely wild.”
Keller spent a great deal of time with Pauline at Cannes. “We had, in private, a great relationship. We went all the time to see the movies together. She had very good manners—but not in the theater when she saw the movie.” At a screening of Marguerite Duras’s Le Camion, with Gérard Depardieu, Pauline started to scream when she saw the actor’s name in the credits. “Before it started, she was saying very bad things about him,” Keller recalled.
James Toback remembered that she viewed her summer at Cannes as “a horrible experience.” He felt that Pauline had, despite her elevated position, retained a heavy streak of provincialism that was rooted in her defensiveness about her upbringing. To yield to the intoxication of a major European cultural event such as Cannes simply would be a betrayal of her entire background. “She was not comfortable in Europe because she was not the pope,” Marthe Keller observed. “There are highly intelligent people, lots of them, in our business in Europe. In America, some of them were a little bit more superficial. I think she was too smart to be only a critic. I think there was somewhere a frustration in her. I thought she was so smart, but there was something mean killing her smartness.”
The summer at Cannes also brought about a small eruption in her harmonious relationship with Robert Altman. There had been trouble earlier, when Pauline had seen his first picture since Nashville, Buffalo Bill and the Indians. After the screening, which was attended by many in Altman’s inner circle, Pauline sat in silence. It was the first Altman picture since Brewster McCloud that she thought was a fizzle, and she was wondering how to let the director know. Finally, she leaned over to him at dinner and whispered that she thought the editing should be speeded up a bit to give the picture more momentum. Altman was drunk, and he exploded at her, telling her to be a big girl and get up and share her opinion with everyone else in the room.
It was a tense moment, followed by another at Cannes, where Altman’s new film, Three Women, starring Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall, was being shown. “I was at Cannes, because Shelley won a prize there for it,” recalled Altman. “And I remember seeing Pauline at the airport,