By the halfway-mark of the festival, Cannes can do irrational and frankly cruel things to your head. Having slunk back to my apartment at 3am after a merry night of wine and pizza some fellow bloggers — only to find myself locked out of said apartment in a cheap sitcom twist — I planned to treat myself to a lie-in while my roommates, Slant’s Matt Noller and the A.V. Club’s Mike D’Angelo, dutifully rose for the 8.30 press screening of Xavier Beauvois’s Competition title “Of Gods and Men.”
Minutes after the door clicked shut behind them, however, I found myself sitting bolt upright in bed: what if was making a terrible mistake? What if “Of Gods and Men” turned out to be the unforeseen “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”-style masterwork of the festival, and I the one dumb schlub who missed it? What if I was forever frozen out of Film Dweeb Nation for not having an opinion on “the Beauvois?” What if?
Suitably panicked, I leaped out of bed, tore through a breakneck shower-and-dress routine and ran — ran — down to the Palais so I could settle into a nosebleed seat, panting and bleary-eyed, with one minute to spare.