Behind-the-scenes at the French film festival you’ve likely never heard of

I recently received an email from a representative at Barrière, a French five-star hotel group, asking if I’d like to go horse riding on a beach at sunset, watch some films and have dinner with Pamela Anderson. My enthusiastic RSVP bit my kind host’s arm clean off.

The destination: Deauville, a tastefully-timbered town on the Normandy coast which is filled with Hèrmes, Louis Vuitton and Longchamp stores and sail boats clanking in the wind. There’s also a long and wide strip of golden beach.

The occasion: the 51^st annual Deauville American Film Festival, or Festival du Cinéma Américain de Deauville, which stands entirely apart from the flash and brash paparazzi-plagued shindigs in Cannes and Venice, where who wore what and why and tabloid gossip overshadows the filmmaking and storytelling. Deauville is simply the world’s classiest movie junket; it’s where the enigmatic grace of Old Hollywood still means something.

The French ardour for cinema is no secret. Heck, they — specifically the Lumière brothers — invented the artform. And they don’t just dig homegrown flicks about moody couples in cafés smoking cigarettes, they love Hollywood pictures too and Deauville is where the two worlds collide. Star-spangled banners fly from every post, transatlantic thesps and auteurs walk the red carpet, and every film shown is credited as American-made — yet the vast majority of those attending are chicly-dressed Parisians hoping to spot a screen icon.

Founded in 1975 by Lionel Chouchan and André Halimi, with the backing of then-mayor Michel d’Ornano and Barrière, the event was conceived as an opportunity to bring the two countries together and highlight Deauville’s Belle Époque hotels, casino, racecourse and culinary scene. The inaugural edition opened with Robert Altman’s Nashville, signalling a commitment to both mainstream and independent cinema. The 1980s and 90s cemented Deauville as a place where stars mingled with cinephiles. Heavyweights including Clint Eastwood, Julia Roberts, Harrison Ford and Jack Nicholson walked the wooden boardwalks studded with cabins named after visiting celebrities. And in Deauville romance isn’t restricted to the screen. It was here, in 1998, that Michael Douglas first got together with Catherine Zeta Jones (apparently he approached the Darling Bud at a meet-and-greet and said: ‘I’m going to be the father of your children’ — which I guess you could get away with in the 1990s if you happened to be a double Academy Award winner).

I started with dinner at Fouquet’s in Paris, part of Hotel Barrière Le Fouquet’s Paris, the Champs Élysées’ silver screen canteen (it hosts the annual César Awards’ dinner). Recent guests include Quentin Tarantino, Jodie Foster, Sean Penn and Brad Pitt. Black and white Harcourt portraits of notable diners hang on the mahogany panelling, and polished brass plaques point to the preferred banquettes of entertainment titans.

Deauville is where the Barrière Group laid its foundations as a leading hotel and casino owner, and friend to the film industry. Its Hotel Le Normandy (above), built in 1912, looms over the waterfront, and its Casino de Deauville, founded the same year, inspired the location of Ian Fleming’s 1958 novel Casino Royale. Le Normandy, constructed in a vast ‘Anglo-Norman cottage’ style, according to architect Théo Petit, is where many of the stars choose to stay, especially the continental ones (the Yanks are more often found in the Hotel Barrière Le Royal 200 metres down the promenade). Le Normandy is where I was put up, too. The popping sound of tennis balls scored the scene via the open windows; dozens of clay courts lie between the hotel and the beach. The festival’s red carpet actually extends through Le Normandy’s lobby, and guests can get papped in their finery, if they wish, as they stride from the lift to the hotel bar, one of the festival’s prime people-watching locations (the house cocktail for the festival’s ten day run was titled Le 51e: Monkey 47, Italicus, yuzu liqueur and Perrier-Jouët, €31). Movie fans and photographers line the scarlet gauntlet from Le Normandy and the Casino to the Convention Centre, where the festival’s award ceremonies and main screenings are held.

Among those receiving an award and standing ovation was Pamela, who’s enjoying a career revival with this summer’s reboot of The Naked Gun and critical acclaim for her lead role in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl. Her name now graces one of the boardwalk cabins, which is apt for an actress so closely associated with a certain red swimsuit. She undertook the unveiling with the requisite American flag (main image). I wonder if anyone has broken it to the organisers yet that she’s actually Canadian.

The festival’s Icon Award went to 92-year-old Kim Novak, the last living Hitchcock blonde, who made a rare appearance on the arm of Benjamin Millepied, the choreographer and former husband of Natalie Portman. ‘Far from the female stereotypes shaped by the industry, she asserted her individuality through a raw, instinctive performance style,’ Benjamin shared in a speech about the actress-turned-artist. The event screened Vertigo and Bell, Book and a Candle (she shares the screen in both with Jimmy Stewart). It also premiered a new documentary about her life, Kim Novak’s Vertigo, directed by Alexandre O. Phillippe.

Upcoming films screened in Deauville this year included the awards-buzzy Bugonia by Yorgos Lanthimos, starring Emma Stone as a kidnapped CEO suspected of being an alien, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, starring The Crown’s Josh O’Connor as an amateur art thief in 1970s Massachusetts, Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut The Chronology of Water, and Scarlett Johansson’s first turn in the director’s chair, Eleanor the Great. But the opening night’s big screening came from a couple of indie comedy filmmakers with whom I wasn’t familiar: Kyle Marvin and Michael Angelo Covino wrote (and the latter directed) Splitsville, a very modern sex farce starring themselves and Dakota Johnson, which was very funny. I joined the pair at that night’s gala dinner at the casino, where Pamela was the guest of honour (although chef Pierre Gagnaire received the heartiest applause when he took his bow during pudding — cinema is still a distant second to cooking in France).

At the lavish dinner, Pamela was to sit next to the scion of the Barrière Group, handsome 38-year-old Alexandre Barrière. Given I didn’t want to get chucked out of my room, I thought it wise to keep the place settings as they were.