Our intrepid correspondent makes a life-saving 4am call to Dial-a-Croissant

I woke up drunk in the afternoon so I guess it was a good party. From what I understand, I’m now experiencing a typical reaction to a Wild Bunch party, the distributor being known for throwing some of the most elaborate and extravagant shindigs at Cannes. Sadly, I missed last year’s party for Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, a notoriously seedy event that included complimentary lap dances and — I’m guessing here ‚ cake.

But this year I squeaked into the post-screening do at the aptly titled Villa Babylone for Maradona Par Kusturica, a new documentary about the soccer legend. No strippers this time — instead, partygoers amused themselves in a less sinful manner by trying to get free kicks past a goaltender and playing in a life-size foosball game. Inside the tent, the No Smoking Band — the raucous Serbo-Croatian group that was the subject of Kusturica’s 2001 doc Super 8 Stories — played crowdpleasing, gypsy-fied covers of Pink Floyd and Deep Purple songs. Nearby, cooks spent the night grilling sausages, thereby enveloping the area in a thick, greasy cloud of meat smoke. A few thousand attendees — mostly industry folk, though I did spot Waltz With Bashir director Ari Folman — ambled all over the villa’s massive grounds when not filling up their drinks. As for me, I was initially excited about the free-pour style favoured by the bartenders. Then I realized that I’d accidentally replaced all of the fluids in my body with Jack Daniel’s and Coke. My heartfelt thanks go to hometown compadre Colin Geddes for getting me home, though not before we tried to ease the hangovers to come by eating chocolate croissants at an all-night patisserie (the French have no need for Denny’s).

Earlier in the evening, I’d begun my boozy binge with glasses of champagne and Spanish wine at a beach party for Le Chant des Oiseaux, the second feature by Albert Serra. The Catalan director’s mesmerizing debut Honor de Cavalleria established his great fondness for inordinately lengthy shots of characters walking across landscapes and not saying much of anything yet Serra’s minimalist aesthetic is suffused with a spirit of lightness. Featuring one of cinema’s most bizarre takes on the Nativity story, the new film charts the arduous journey of the three wise men as they make their way to meet baby Jesus. Much of the running time consists of interminable scenes of these three robed and crowned figures wandering across deserts, struggling to climb up mountains or asking each other whether they have any idea where they’re going.

But they do eventually make it see the little guy, which is a good thing since the role of Joseph marks the screen debut of Mark Peranson, Vancouver film fest programmer and publisher of Cinema Scope magazine. Quite why Peranson is speaking Hebrew while everyone else speaks Catalan is one of the many beguiling mysteries of Serra’s mordantly funny, glacially paced and visually stunning biblical epic. At the party afterward, Peranson was resplendent in a white suit that was better suited to Tony Manero than JC’s pops. He talked about the making-of doc that he’s nearly finished on the film and about Serra’s freewheeling methodology (he shot over 140 hours of footage, nearly all of it improvised). Peranson’s yet to be offered any other roles by his filmmaker friends but surely it’s only a matter of time before he’s playing a refrigerator repairman in a movie by Pedro Costa.

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