' ' Cinema Romantico: The Cannes Brûlé Palme

Wednesday, June 07, 2023

The Cannes Brûlé Palme

During the Christmases of my youth, we would often have dinner at the house of some family friends, and those friends would invite a couple of their own friends from their block. One year, the conversation turned, as it sometimes would, to pop culture, and though I can’t recall specifics or how the chat wound its way there, eventually all the adults were expounding on the glamour of Sophia Loren and how Gen X whippersnappers like me did not understand such old school beauty. I’m not sure which year this was, exactly, and so I’m not sure where I was in my celebrity crush cycle. I want to say this was pre- “Cryin’” video so before Alicia Silverstone. Maybe 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympic American swimmer Summer Sanders? “Can two Oscars compare with two Gold Medals?” I definitely did not say. I don’t remember what I thought or what I said, but I’m sure I said something, because young people always have something to say even if their bona fides are scant. Because young people are always convinced they already understand the world as well as their elders, if not better than their elders, and as I have aged, I have frequently reminded myself not to fault young people for doing this because I refuse to let myself forget what it was like to be young even as getting older has revealed to me that, yes, my elders were right and there are so many things I did not know, or did not understand, not truly, until I got older, that time brings a perspective youth can’t hope to match. 

And that, reader, brings us to the recently concluded 76th annual Cannes Film Festival where Julia Fox walked the red carpet in a transparent glass, not aluminum, top, Mia Regan (who?) sported an Art Vandelay-approved latex gown, and Lily-Rose Depp wore something Christy Turlington wore in 1994 because the 90s are back if not necessarily back for those of us who grew up in the 90s. Nope, it’s time to bring this whole crazy thing we call life full circle, to concede I now understand what those pesky adults were speaking of so many Christmases ago and declare in my capacity as a 2023 pesky adult that this year’s winner of Cinema Romantico’s not-famously un-exalted Brûlé Palme, a variation on Cannes’ prestigious Palme d’Or, awarded each year to Cinema Romantico’s favorite Cannes Film Festival attendee, is not Fox, Regan (still not sure), nor Depp but Catherine Zeta-Jones, 53 years old and letting herself look like it, reveling in it. These whippersnappers, they don’t understand old school beauty. Age is beauty, punks. 



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