Do Not Go to the Cannes Film Festival

I just returned from a 24 hour visit to the Cannes Film Festival. At Nice Airport, I demanded the smallest car Avis had in their garage and got a people carrier. The girl - she being French and I English - was delighted. Luckily I had bought some cool shades. These may have persuaded the people on La Croisette who stared in horror at my family monobox that I was, in fact, one of them and had merely totalled the Ferrari.
At a horrible bar, I paid 4.50 Euros for a small glass of American Budweiser - the nastiest drink ever offered to a gullible world - and watched the passing Eurotrash freak show in a condition of mounting paranoia and alienation. Where, I wondered, is the US Sixth Fleet when I really need it? Buddies, we don't require you to make beer, just to upset the French.
I had a film ticket and was told I had to go up the red carpet into the main auditorium. But, of course, I could not because I was not wearing a papillon - bow tie. Happily, a lady appeared with a bagful of papillons. I paid 15 Euros. This bought not just the tie but the services of the lady who put it on for me. "Merci," I scowled.
So, suitably dressed, I went up the red carpet. I was greeted by "security" who asked to look at my bag. And that's what they did - looked at it, didn't open it or anything. Then, 90 minutes into this fiasco, I discovered I was in the wrong place. At least six men had told me it was the right place. I was taken to the right place but the right place would not let me in because, in a deeper sense apparent only to the Gallic imagination, I was actually in another wrong place. I had to go outside and stand in a queue. I need not have bought the bow tie, I need not have climbed the red carpet. Sporadic scuffles were breaking out. We were all deranged with anger, having endured nothing but casual and inept brutality. Police and the "security" didn't care, they had the state behind them. France, I concluded yet again, is a communist country in all but name and, after a long career of attending nasty events, I can confidently announce that the Cannes Film Festival is the nastiest of the lot.