2:44 PM

What luck! The last thing she was expecting that morning was to meet the man who wouldshe was surechange her life. But there he is, as slop- pily dressed as ever, sitting with two friends, because powerful people dont need to show how powerful they are, they dont even need body- guards.

Maureen has a theory that the people at Cannes can be divided into two categories:

(a) the tanned, who spend the whole day in the sun (they are al- ready winners) and have the necessary badge to gain entry to certain restricted areas of the Festival. They arrive back at their hotels to find several invitations awaiting them, most of which will be thrown in the bin.

(b)the pale, who scurry from one gloomy office to the next, watching auditions, and either seeing some really good films that will be lost in the welter of other things on offer, or having to put up with some real horrors that might just win a place in the sun (among the tanned) because the makers know the right people.

Javits Wild, of course, sports an enviable tan.

The Festival that takes over this small city in the south of France for twelve days, putting up prices, allowing only authorized cars to drive through the streets, and filling the airport with private jets and the beaches with models, isnt just a red carpet surrounded by pho- tographers, a carpet along which the big stars walk on their way into the Palais des Congres. Cannes isnt about fashion, its about cinema!

What strikes you most is the luxury and the glamour, but the real heart of the Festival is the film industrys huge parallel market: buyers and sellers from all over the world who come together to do deals on films that have already been made or to talk investments and ideas. On an average day, four hundred movies are shown, most of them in apartments hired for the duration, with people perched uncomfortably on beds, complaining about the heat and demanding that their every whim be met, from bottles of mineral water up, and leaving the people showing the film with their nerves in tatters and frozen smiles on their faces, for its essential to agree to everything, to grant every wish, be- cause what matters is having the chance to show something that has probably been years in the making.

However, while these forty-eight hundred new productions are fighting tooth and nail for a chance to leave that hotel room and get shown in a proper cinema, the world of dreams is setting off in a differ- ent direction: the new technologies are gaining ground, people dont leave their houses so much anymore because they dont feel safe, or because they have too much work, or because of all those cable TV stations where you can usually choose from about five hundred films a day and pay almost nothing.

Worse still, the Internet has made anyone and everyone a filmmaker. Specialist portals show films of babies walking, men and women being decapitated in wars, or women who exhibit their bodies merely for the pleasure of knowing that the person watching them will be enjoying their own moment of solitary pleasure, films of people freezing in Grand Central Station, of traffic accidents, sports clips, and fashion shows, films made with hidden video cameras intent on embarrassing the poor innocents who walk past them.

Of course, people do still go out, but they prefer to spend their money on restaurant meals and designer clothes because they can get everything else on their high-definition TV screens or on their com- puters.

The days when everyone knew who had won the Palme dOr are long gone. Now, if you ask who won last year, even people who were actually there at the Festival wont be able to remember. Some Roma- nian, wasnt it? says one. Im not sure, but I think it was a German film, says another. Theyll sneak off to consult the catalogue and dis- cover that it was an Italian, whose films, it turns out, are only shown at art cinemas.

After a period of intense competition with video rentals, cinemas started to prosper again, but now they seem to be entering another period of decline, having to compete with Internet rentals, with pirat- ing and those DVDs of old films that are given away free with news- papers. This makes distribution an even more savage affair. If one of the big studios considers a new release to be a particularly large in- vestment, theyll try to ensure that its being shown in the maximum number of cinemas at the same time, leaving little space for any new film venturing onto the market.

And the few adventurous souls who decide to take the riskdespite all the arguments againstdiscover too late that it isnt enough to have a quality product. The cost of getting a film into cinemas in the large capitals of the world is prohibitive, what with full-page advertisements in newspapers and magazines, receptions, press officers, promotion junkets, ever more expensive teams of people, sophisticated filming equipment, and increasingly scarce labor. And the most difficult prob- lem of all: finding someone who will distribute the film.

And yet every year it goes on, the trudging from place to place, the appointments, the Superclass who are interested in everything except whats being shown on the screen, the companies prepared to pay a tenth of what is reasonable just to give some filmmaker the honor of having his or her work shown on television, the requests that the film be reworked so as not to offend families, the demands for the film to be recut, the promises (not always kept) that if the script is changed completely to focus on one particular theme, a contract will be issued next year.

People listen and accept because they have no option. The Super- class rules the world; their arguments are subtle, their voices soft, their smiles discreet, but their decisions are final. They know. They accept or reject. They have the power. And power doesnt negotiate with anyone, only with itself. However, all is not lost. In the world of fiction and in the real world, there is always a hero.

And Maureen is staring proudly at one such hero now! The great meeting that is finally going to take place in two days time after nearly three years of work, dreams, phone calls, trips to Los An- geles, presents, favors asked of friends in her Bank of Favors, and the influence of an ex-boyfriend of hers, who had studied with her at film school, then decided it was much safer to work for an important film magazine than risk losing both his head and his money.

Ill talk to Javits, the ex-boyfriend had said. But he doesnt need anyone, not even the journalists who can promote or destroy his products. Hes above all that. We once tried getting together an article trying to find out how it is that he has all these cinema owners eating out of his hand, but no one he works with was prepared to say any- thing. Ill talk to him, but I cant put any pressure on him.

He did talk to him and got him to watch The Secrets of the Cellar. The following day, she received a phone call, saying that Javits would meet her in Cannes.

At the time, Maureen didnt even dare to say that she was just ten minutes by taxi from his office; instead they arranged to meet in this far-off French city. She bought a plane ticket to Paris, caught a train that took all day to reach Cannes, showed her voucher to the bad-tempered manager of a cheap hotel, installed herself in her single room where she had to climb over her luggage to reach the bathroom, and (again thanks to her ex-boyfriend) wangled invitations to a few second-rate eventsa promotion for a new brand of vodka or the launch of a new line in T-shirtsbut it was far too late to apply for the pass that would allow her into the Palais des Festivals et des Congres.

She has overspent her budget, traveled for more than twenty hours, but she will at least get her ten minutes. And shes sure that shell emerge with a contract and a future before her. Yes, the movie indus- try is in crisis, but so what? Movies (however few) are still making money, arent they? Big cities are plastered with posters advertising new movies. And what are celebrity magazines full of? Gossip about movie stars! Maureen knowsor, rather, believesthat the death of cinema has been declared many times before, and yet still it survives. Cinema was dead when television arrived. Cinema was dead when video rentals arrived. Cinema was dead when the Internet began al- lowing access to pirate sites. But cinema is still alive and well in the streets of this small Mediterranean town, which, of course, owes its fame to the Festival.

Now its simply a case of making the most of this manna from heaven. And of accepting everything, absolutely everything. Javits Wild is here. He has seen her film. The subject of the film is spot-on: sexual exploitation, voluntary or forced, was getting a lot of media at- tention after a series of cases that had hit the headlines worldwide. It is just the right moment for The Secrets of the Cellar to appear on the posters put up by the distribution chain he controlled.

Javits Wild, the rebel with a cause, the man who was revolution- izing the way films reached the wider public. Only the actor Robert Redford had tried something similar with his Sundance Film Festival for independent filmmakers, but nevertheless, after decades of effort, Redford still hadnt managed to break through the barrier into a world that mobilized hundreds of millions of dollars in the United States, Europe, and India. Javits, though, was a winner.

Javits Wild, the savior of filmmakers, the great legend, the ally of minority interests, the friend of artists, the new patron, who obviously used some very intelligent system (she had no idea what it was, but she knew it worked) to reach cinemas all around the world.

Javits Wild has arranged a ten-minute meeting with her in two days time. This can mean only one thing, that he has accepted her project and that everything else is merely a matter of detail.

I will accept everything, absolutely everything, she repeats.

Obviously, in those ten minutes, Maureen wont have a chance to say a word about what she has been through in the seven years (yes, a quarter of her life) that have gone into making her film. There will be no point in telling him that she went to film school, directed a few com- mercials, made two short films that were warmly received in various small-town cinemas or in alternative bars in New York. That in order to raise the million dollars needed for a professional production, she had mortgaged the house she inherited from her parents. That this was her one chance because she didnt have another house to mortgage.

She had watched as her fellow students, after much struggling, opted for the comfortable world of commercialsof which there were more and moreor some safe but obscure job in one of the many com- panies that made TV series. After the warm reception given to her short films, she began to dream of higher things and then there was no stopping her.

She was convinced she had a mission: to make the world a better place for future generations, by getting together with like-minded people, to show that art isnt just a way of entertaining or amusing a lost society; by exposing world leaders as the flawed people they are; by saving the children who were now dying of hunger somewhere in Africa; by speaking out about environmental problems; by putting an end to social injustice.

This was, of course, an ambitious project, but she was sure she would achieve it if only through sheer doggedness. To do this she needed to purify her soul, and so she turned to the four forces that had always guided her: love, death, power, and time. We must love because we are loved by God. We must be conscious of death if we are to have a proper understanding of life. We must struggle in order to grow, but without falling into the trap of the power we gain through that struggle, because we know that such power is worthless. Finally, we must accept that our eternal soul is, at this moment, caught in the web of time with all its opportunities and its limitations.

Caught in the web of time she might be, but she could still work on what gave her pleasure and filled her with enthusiasm. And through her films, she could make her contribution to a world that seemed to be disintegrating around her and could try to change reality and trans- form human beings.

When her father died, after complainingallhislifethathe had never had the chance to do what he had always dreamed of doing, she realized something very important: transformations always occur during moments of crisis.

She didnt want to end her life as he had. She wouldnt like to have to tell her daughter: There was something I wanted to do and there was even a point when I could have done it, but I just didnt have the courage to take the risk. When she received her inheritance, she knew then that it had been given to her for one reason only: to allow her to fulfill her destiny.

She accepted the challenge. Unlike other adolescent girls who always dreamed of being famous actresses, her dream had been to tell stories that subsequent generations could see, smile at, and dream about. Her great example was Citizen Kane. That first film by a radio producer who wanted to make an exposŽ of a powerful American press magnate became a classic not just because of its story, but be- cause it dealt in a creative and innovative manner with the ethical and technical problems of the day. All it took was one film to gain eternal fame.

His first film.

It was possible to get it right the first time. Even though its director, Orson Welles, never made anything as good again. Even though he had disappeared from the scene (that does happen) and was now only studied in courses about cinema, someone was sure to rediscover his genius sooner or later. Citizen Kane wasnt his only legacy; he had proved to everyone that if your first step was good enough, you would never lack for invitations thereafter. And she would take up those invi- tations. She had promised herself that she would never forget the dif- ficulties she had been through and that her life would contribute to dignifying human life.

And since there can only ever be one first film, she had poured all her physical efforts, her prayers, and her emotional energy into one project. Unlike her friends, who were always firing off scripts, propos- als, and ideas, only to end up working on several things at once without any of them ever really coming to anything, Maureen dedicated herself body and soul to The Secrets of the Cellar, the story of five nuns who are visited by a sex maniac. Instead of trying to convert him to Christian salvation, they realize that the only way they can communicate with him is by accepting the norms of his aberrant world; they decide to surrender their bodies to him so that he can understand the glory of God through love.

Her plan was a simple one. Hollywood actresses, however famous they might be, usually disappear from the cast lists when they reach thirty-five. They still continue to appear in the pages of the celebrity magazines, are seen at charity auctions and big parties; they embrace humanitarian causes, and when they realize that they really are about to vanish from the spotlight entirely, they start to get married or have messy divorces and create public scandalsand all for a few months, weeks, or days of glory. In that period between unemployment and total obscurity, money is of no importance. They will take any role if it gives them a chance to appear on screen.

Maureen approached actresses who, less than a decade earlier, had been at the top of the tree, but who now sensed that the ground was be- ginning to slip away from under them and that they desperately needed to get back to the way things were. It was a good script; she sent it to their agents, who demanded an absurd salary and got a straightforward no as an answer. Her next step was to approach each actress individu- ally. She told them that she had the money for the project, and they all ended up accepting on the understanding that no one would know that they were working for almost nothing.

In something like the film industry, there was no point in being humble. Sometimes, the ghost of Orson Welles would appear to her in dreams: Try the impossible. Dont start low down because thats where you are now. Climb those rungs quickly before they take the ladder away. If youre afraid, say a prayer, but carry on. She had an excellent script, a first-class cast, and knew that she had to produce something that was acceptable to the big studios and distributors, but without sacrificing quality. It was possible and, indeed, obligatory for art and commerce to go hand-in-hand. As for the rest, well, the rest consisted of various things: the kind of critic whos into mental mastur- bation and who loves films no one else understands; the small alterna- tive circuits where the same half dozen people emerge from showings and spend the small hours in bars, smoking and discussing one particu- lar scene (whose meaning was, very possibly, quite different from the one intended when it was filmed); directors giving lectures to explain what should be obvious to the audience; trade union meetings call- ing for more state aid for domestic cinema; manifestos in intellectual magazinesthe result of interminable meetings, at which the same old complaints were made about the governments lack of interest in supporting the arts; the occasional letter published in the serious press and usually read only by the interested parties or the families of the interested parties.

Who changes the world? The Superclass. Those who do. Those who alter the behavior, hearts, and minds of the largest possible number of people.

Thats why she wanted Javits, an Oscar, and Cannes.

And since she couldnt get those things democraticallyother people were very willing to offer advice, but never to shoulder any of the risksshe simply gambled everything. She took on whoever was available, spent months rewriting the script, persuaded excellent but unknownart directors, designers, and supporting actors to take part, promising them almost no money, only increased visibility in the future. They were all impressed by the names of the five main actresses (The budget must be astronomical!), and initially asked for large salaries, but ended up convinced that participating in such a project would look really good on their CVs. Maureen was so enthusiastic about the idea that her enthusiasm seemed to open all doors.

Now came the final step, the one that would make all the difference. It isnt enough for a writer or musician to produce something of qual- ity, they have to make sure their work doesnt end up gathering dust on a shelf or in a drawer.

Vis-i-bil-i-ty is whats required!

She sent a copy of the film to just one person: Javits Wild. She used all her contacts. She suffered rejection, but carried on anyway. She was ignored, but that didnt diminish her courage. She was mistreated, ridi- culed, excluded, but still she believed it was possible because she had poured her lifeblood into what she had done. Then her ex-boyfriend entered the scene, and Javits Wild agreed to see her film and to meet her.

She keeps her eyes on Javits all through lunch, savoring in antici- pation the moment they will spend together in two days time. Sud- denly, she notices him go stiff, his eyes fixed on nothing. One of the friends with him glances behind and to the side, slips one hand inside his jacket. The other man starts frantically keying in a number on his mobile phone.

Has something happened? Surely not. The people nearest him are still talking, drinking, enjoying another day of Festival, parties, sun, and nice bodies.

One of the men tries to help Javits up and make him walk, but he appears incapable of movement. It cant be anything serious. Too much drink perhaps. Tiredness. Stress. No, it cant be anything serious. She has come so far, she is so close and . . .

She can hear a siren in the distance. It must be the police, cutting their way through the permanently congested traffic in order to reach some important person.

One of the men puts Javitss arm around his shoulder and more or less carries him toward the door. The siren is getting closer. The other man, still with his hand inside his jacket, keeps looking in all direc- tions. At one point, their eyes meet.

Javits is being taken up the ramp by one of his friends, and Maureen is wondering how someone so slight can possibly carry such a heavily built man and with so little apparent effort.

The sound of the siren stops right outside the tent. Javits has, by now, disappeared with one of the friends, but the second man is walking toward her, one hand still inside his jacket.

What happened? she asks, frightened, because years of directing actors have taught her that this mans face is that of a professional killer, a face that looks as if it were carved out of stone.

You know what happened, the man says in an accent she cant identify.

I saw that he began to feel ill, but what did happen?

The man keeps his hand inside his jacket, and at that moment, it occurs to Maureen that this might be a chance to transform a minor incident into a great possibility.

Can I help? Can I go with him?

The hand in the jacket seems to relax a little, but the eyes watch every move she makes.

Ill come with you. I know Javits Wild. Im a friend of his.

After what seems like an eternity, but which cant have been more than a fraction of a second, the man turns and walks quickly away toward the Boulevard, without saying a word.

Maureens brain is working fast. Why did he say that she knew what had happened? And why did he suddenly lose all interest in her?

The other guests havent noticed a thing, apart from the sound of the siren, which they probably attribute to something going on out in the street. Sirens have nothing to do with joy, sun, drinks, contacts, beautiful women, handsome men, with the pale and the tanned. Sirens belong to another world, a world of heart attacks, diseases, and crime. Sirens are of no interest to the people here.

Maureens head begins to spin. Something has happened to Javits, and this could be a gift from the gods. She runs to the door and sees an ambulance speeding away, sirens blaring, down the blocked-off lane of the Boulevard.

Thats my friend, she says to one of the bodyguards at the en- trance. Where have they taken him?

The man gives her the name of a hospital. Without pausing to think, Maureen starts running to find a taxi. Ten minutes later, she re- alizes that there are no taxis in the city, only those summoned by hotel porters, lured by the prospect of generous tips. Since she has no money in her bag, she goes into a pizzeria, shows someone working there the map she has with her, and learns that she must run for at least half an hour to reach her objective.

Shes been running all her life, so half an hour wont make much difference.