1:00 AM

It all began, they say, with an unknown nineteen-year-old posing in a bikini for photographers who had nothing better to do during the 1953 Cannes Festival. She immediately shot to stardom, and her name became legendary: Brigitte Bardot. And now others think they can do the same. No one understands the importance of being an actress; beauty is the only thing that counts.

Thats why women with long legs and dyed hair, the bottle blondes of this world, travel hundreds or even thousands of miles to be in Cannes, even if only to spend the whole day on the beach, hoping to be seen, photographed, discovered. They want to escape from the trap that awaits all women: becoming a housewife, who makes supper for her husband every evening, takes the children to school every day, and tries to dig up some dirt on her neighbors monotonous lives so as to have something to gossip about with her friends. What these women want is fame, glory, and glamour, to be the envy of the other people who live in their town and of the boys and girls who always thought of them as ugly ducklings, unaware that they would one day grow up to be a swan or blossom into a flower coveted by everyone. They want a career in the world of dreams even if they have to borrow money to get silicone breast implants or to buy some newer, sexier outfits. Drama school? Forget it, good looks and the right contacts are all you need. The cinema can work miracles, always assuming, of course, you can ever break into that world. Anything to escape from the prison of the provincial city and the long, dreary, repetitive days. There are millions of people who dont mind that kind of life, and they should be left to live their lives as they see fit. However, if you come to the Festival you must leave fear at home and be prepared for anything: making spur- of-the-moment decisions, telling lies if necessary, pretending to be younger than you are, smiling at people you loathe, feigning an interest in people who bore you, saying, I love you without a thought for the consequences, or stabbing in the back the friend who once helped you out, but who has now become an undesirable rival. Dont let feelings of remorse or shame get in your way. The reward is worth any amount of sacrifice.

Fame. Glory. Glamour.

Gabriela finds these thoughts irritating. Its definitely not the best way to start a new day. Worse, she has a hangover.

At least theres one consolation. She hasnt woken up in a five-star hotel next to a man telling her to put her clothes on and leave because he has important business to deal with, like buying or selling films.

She gets up and looks around to see if any of her friends are still in the apartment. Needless to say theyre not. Theyve long since left for the Boulevard de la Croisette, for the swimming pools, hotel bars, yachts, possible lunch dates, and chance meetings on the beach. There are five fold-out mattresses on the floor of the small shared apartment, hired for the duration at an exorbitant rent. The mattresses are sur- rounded by a tangle of clothes, discarded shoes, and hangers that no one has taken the trouble to put back in the wardrobe.

The clothes take up more room here than the people, she thinks.

Not that any of them could even dream of wearing clothes designed by Elie Saab, Karl Lagerfeld, Versace, or Galliano, but what they have nevertheless takes up most of the apartment: bikinis, miniskirts, T-shirts, platform shoes, and a vast amount of makeup.

One day Ill wear what I like, but right now, I just need to be given a chance, she thinks.

And why does she want that chance? Quite simple. Because she knows shes the best, despite her experi- ence at schoolwhen she so disappointed her parentsand despite the challenges shes faced since in order to prove to herself that she can overcome difficulties, frustrations, and defeats. She was born to win and to shine, of that she has no doubt.

And when I get what I always wanted, I know Ill have to ask myself: do they love and admire me because Im me or because Im famous?

She knows people who have achieved stardom on the stage and, contrary to her expectations, theyre not at peace with themselves; theyre insecure, full of doubts, unhappy as soon as they come offstage. They want to be actors so as not to have to be themselves, and they live in fear of making the one false step that could end their career.

Im different, though. Ive always been me. Is that true? Or does everyone in her position think the same?

She gets up and makes herself some coffee. The kitchen is a mess, and none of her friends has bothered to wash the dishes. She doesnt know why shes woken up in such a bad mood and with so many doubts. She knows her job, shes devoted herself to it heart and soul, and yet its as if people refuse to recognize her talent. She knows what human beings are like, too, especially menfuture allies in a battle she needs to win soon, because shes twenty-five already and nearly too old for the dream factory. She knows three things:

(a) that men are less treacherous than women; (b)that they never notice what a woman is wearing because theyre always mentally undressing her; (c) that as long as youve got breasts, thighs, buttocks, and belly in good trim, you can conquer the world.

Because of those three things, and because she knows that all the other women shes competing with try to emphasize their attributes, she pays attention only to item (c) on her list. She exercises and tries to keep fit, avoids diets, and, illogical though it may seem, dresses very discreetly. This has worked well so far, and she can usually pass for younger than her age. Shes hoping that itll do the trick in Cannes too.

Breasts, buttocks, thighs. They can focus on those things now if they want to, but the day will come when theyll see what she can really do.

She drinks her coffee and begins to understand her bad mood. Shes surrounded by some of the most beautiful women on the planet! She certainly doesnt consider herself ugly, but theres no way she can compete with them. She needs to decide what to do. She had thought long and hard before making this trip, money is tight, and she doesnt have much time in which to land a contract. She went to various places during the first two days, giving people a copy of her CV and her photos, but all she achieved was an invitation to last nights party at a cheap restaurant, with the music at full blast, and where she met no one from the Superclass. In order to lose her inhibitions, she drank more than she should and ended up not knowing where she was or what she was doing there. Everything seemed strange to herEurope, the way people dress, the different languages, the phony jollitywhen the truth was everyone was wishing they could have been invited to some more important event, instead of being in that utterly insignifi- cant place, listening to the same old music, and having to hold shouted conversations about other peoples lives and the injustices committed by the powerful on the powerless.

Gabriela is tired of talking about these so-called injustices. Thats simply the way it is. They choose the people they want to choose and dont have to explain themselves to anyone, which is why she needs a plan. A lot of other young women with the same dream (but not, of course, with as much talent as she) will be doing the rounds with their CVs and their photos; the producers who come to the Festival must be inundated with portfolios, DVDs, business cards.

What would make her stand out?

She needs to think. She wont get another chance like this, largely because shes spent all her savings on this trip. Andhorror of hor- rorsshes getting old. Shes twenty-five. This is her last chance. While she drinks her coffee, she looks through the small kitchen window at the dead-end street down below. All she can see is a tobac- conists and a little girl eating chocolate. Yes, this is her last chance. She hopes it will turn out quite differently from the first one.

She thinks back to when she was eleven years old and performing in her first school play at one of the most expensive schools in Chicago. Her subsequent desire to succeed was not born of the unanimous ac- claim she received from the audience, composed of fathers, mothers, relatives, and teachers. Far from it. She was playing the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. She had got the partone of the best roles in the playafter auditioning along with a lot of other girls and boys.

Her first line was: Your hair wants cutting. Then Alice would reply: You should learn not to make personal remarks, its very rude.

When the long-awaited moment came, a moment she had rehearsed and rehearsed, she was so nervous that she got the line wrong and said instead: Your hair wants washing. The girl playing Alice said her next line anyway, and the audience would never have noticed anything was wrong if Gabriela, who knew she had made a mistake, hadnt promptly lost the power of speech. Since the Mad Hatter was an es- sential character if the scene was to continue, and since children are not good at improvising on stage (although they improvise happily enough in real life), no one knew what to do. Then, after several long minutes, during which the actors simply looked at each other, the teacher started applauding, announced it was time for an interval, and ordered every- one offstage.

Gabriela not only left the stage, she left the school in tears. The following day, she found out that the scene with the Mad Hatter had been cut, and the actors would instead move straight on to the game of croquet with the Queen. The teacher said this didnt matter in the least because the story of Alice in Wonderland is a lot of nonsense anyway, but during playtime, the other girls and boys ganged up on Gabriela and started beating her.

This wasnt so very unusualit was a fairly regular occurrence and she had learned to defend herself as energetically as when she, in turn, attacked the weaker children. On this occasion, however, she took the beating without uttering a word and without shedding a tear. Her reaction was so surprising that the fight lasted almost no time at all; her schoolmates expected her to scream and shout, and, when she didnt, rapidly lost interest. For with each blow, Gabriela was think- ing:

Ill be a great actress one day and then youll be sorry.

Who says that children arent capable of deciding what they want to do in life?

Adults do.

And when we grow to be adults ourselves, we believe that we really are wise beings who are always right. Many children had doubtless been through a similar experience, playing the role of the Mad Hatter or Sleeping Beauty or Aladdin or Alice, and decided there and then to abandon the spotlights and the applause. Gabriela, though, had never before lost a battle; she was the prettiest and most intelligent student in school and always got the best marks in class; and she knew intuitively that if she didnt fight back at once, she would be lost.

It was one thing to get a beating from her schoolmatesbecause she could give as good as she gotbut it was quite another to carry a failure like that around with her for the rest of her life. As we all know, a fluffed line in a school play, an inability to dance as well as everyone else, or rude comments passed about skinny legs or a big headwhich all children have to put up withcan have two radically different con- sequences.

Some people opt for revenge and try to be really good at whatever it is the others thought they couldnt do. One day, youll envy me, they think.

Most people, however, accept their limitations, and then things tend to go from bad to worse. They grow up insecure and obedient (although they dream of a day when theyll be free and able to do what- ever they want), they get married to prove that theyre not as ugly as other kids said they were (although deep down they still believe they are), they have children so that no one can say theyre infertile (even though they never wanted kids anyway), they dress well so that no one can say they dress badly (although they know people will say that anyway).

By the following week, the incident at the play had been forgotten by everyone at school, but Gabriela had decided that, one day, when she was a world-famous actress, accompanied by secretaries, bodyguards, photographers, and legions of fans, she would go back to that school. She would put on a performance of Alice in Wonderland for needy chil- dren, she would make the news, and her childhood friends would say:

I was on the same stage as her once!

Her mother wanted her to study chemical engineering, and as soon as she finished high school, her parents sent her to the Illinois Institute of Technology. During the day, she studied protein paths and the structure of benzene, but she spent her evenings with Ibsen, Coward, and Shakespeare while attending a drama course paid for with money sent to her by her parents to buy clothes and course books. She trained with the best professionals and had excellent teachers. She received good reviews and letters of recommendation, she performed (without her parents knowledge) as a backup singer for a rock group and as a belly dancer in a play about Lawrence of Arabia. It was always a good idea to accept any role that came along. There was always the chance that someone important might be in the audience, someone who would invite her to her first real audition, and then all those testing times and all her struggles to gain a place in the spotlight would be over.

The years passed. Gabriela made TV commercials, toothpaste ads, did some modeling work, and was even tempted to respond to an invi- tation from a group that specialized in providing escorts for business- men because she desperately needed money to put together a proper portfolio to send to all the major modeling and acting agencies in the United States. Fortunately, Godin whom she never lost faith saved her. That same day, she was offered a job as an extra in a video of a Japanese singer, which was going to be filmed beneath the viaduct of the Chicago El. She was paid much more than she expected (apparently the producers had demanded a fortune in fees for the foreign cast), and with that extra money she managed to produce the vital book of photos (or book, as its known in every language in the world), which also cost much more than she had imagined.

She was always telling herself that she was just at the beginning of her career, even though the days and months were beginning to fly by. She might have been picked to play Ophelia in Hamlet while she was in the drama course, but life mostly offered her only ads for deodorants and beauty creams. Whenever she went to an agency to show them her book and the letters of recommendation from teachers, friends, and colleagues, she found the waiting room full of girls who looked very like her, all of them smiling, all of them hating each other, and all doing whatever they could to get something, anything, that would give them visibility, as the professionals called it.

She would wait hours for her turn to come, and meanwhile read books on meditation and positive thinking. She would end up sitting opposite someonemale or femalewho ignored the letters and went straight to the photos, not that they ever commented on those either. They would make a note of her name. Sometimes, she would be called in for an audition, about one in ten of which bore fruit. There she would be again, with all her talent (or so she thought), standing in front of a camera and a lot of ill-mannered people, who were always telling her: Relax, smile, turn to the right, drop your chin a little, lick your lips. And the result: a photo of a new brand of coffee.

And what happened when she wasnt called? She felt rejected, but soon learned to live with that and come to see it as a necessary experi- ence, a test of her perseverance and faith. She refused to accept the fact that the drama course, the letters of recommendation, the CV listing minor roles performed in minor theaters, were of no use at all . . .

Her mobile phone rang. ...noneatall. It continued to ring. She was still traveling back in time as she gazed out at the tobacco-

nists and at the little girl eating chocolate, then she finally emerged from her reverie, realized what was happening, and answered the phone.

A voice at the other end was saying that she had an audition in two hours time. She had an audition!

In Cannes!

So it had been worth crossing the ocean, arriving in a city where all the hotels were full, meeting up at the airport with other young women in exactly the same position as she (a Pole, two Russians, and a Brazil- ian), and going round knocking on doors until they found that shared, exorbitantly priced apartment. After all those years of trying her luck in Chicago and traveling now and then to Los Angeles in search of more agents, more advertisements, more rejections, it turned out that her future lay in Europe!

In two hours time?

She couldnt catch a bus because she didnt know the routes. She was staying high up on a steep hill and had only been down it twice so farto distribute copies of her book and to go to that stupid party last night. On both occasions, when she reached the bottom of the hill, she had hitched a lift from complete strangers, usually single men in mag- nificent convertibles. Everyone knew Cannes to be a safe place, and all women know that good looks help when trying to get a ride, but she couldnt leave anything to chance this time, she would have to resolve the problem herself. Auditions follow a rigorous timetable, that was one of the first things you learn at any acting agency. She had noticed on her first day in Cannes that the traffic was almost permanently grid- locked, and so all she could do was get dressed and leave at once. She would be there in an hour and a half; she remembered the hotel where the producer was staying because it was on the pilgrimage route she had followed yesterday, in search of some opportunity, some opening.

Now the problem was what to wear.

She fell upon the suitcase she had brought with her, chose some Armani jeans made in China and bought on the black market in Chi- cago for a fifth of the real price. No one could say they were fake be- cause they werent: everyone knew that the Chinese manufacturers sent eighty percent of what they produced to the original stores, with the remaining twenty percent being sold off by employees on the side. It was, shall we say, excess stock, surplus to requirements.

She was wearing a white DKNY T-shirt, which had cost more than the jeans. Faithful to her principles, she knew that the more discreet the clothes, the better. No short skirts, no plunging necklines, because if other women had been invited to the audition, that is what they would be wearing.

She wasnt sure about her makeup. In the end, she opted for a very light foundation and an even lighter application of lip liner. She had already lost a precious fifteen minutes.