Spring Break at Cannes

By JACOB BERNSTEINMAY 23, 2014

CANNES, FRANCE — Dollars. Euros. Dollars. Euros. By 11 p.m., the bids were coming in so fast that Sharon Stone, who was handling part of the auction, couldn’t even keep the currencies straight.

It was Thursday night, and the Cannes Film Festival was nearing its close with the gala to cap a week of glittery galas: amfAR’s annual Cinema Against AIDS dinner, where movie stars and supermodels show up en masse in bedazzled designer gowns, and the seriously rich come to bask in their reflective glow and part ways with their money for a good cause.

One minute, a person near the tented stage at the legendary Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc was offering 100,000 euros for 42 red designer dresses that had just appeared in a runway show organized by the magazine editor Carine Roitfeld.

Seemingly the next, those dresses had sold for €3.5 million, or about $4.9 million, to a Russian billionaire named Igor Sosin, whose wife (decked out in a white Chanel gown) had complained to him earlier in the evening that she simply didn’t have pretty-enough clothes to wear.

The AmfAR Gala: A Night for Movie Stars, Supermodels and Billionaires

Credit Stefania Iemmi for The New York Times

Did Mr. Sosin even like the color red, much less want his wife to have an entire wardrobe of it, a person passing by his table asked. “Maybe,” he said, shrugging. “This is not expensive.”

Certainly not compared to the roughly $15.3 million that another Eastern European magnate, Leonard Blavatnik, spent moments later acquiring a gilded woolly mammoth skeleton by Damien Hirst.

Justin Bieber, wearing a double-breasted tuxedo jacket with the sleeves scrunched up, jumped out of his chair and bounded over to Mr. Blavatnik to congratulate him on his acquisition.

Then, a 2015 trip to outer space with Leonardo DiCaprio on Virgin Galactic was auctioned off for about $975,000 (“Who wants to leave Earth with Leo?” Ms. Stone asked), and Robin Thicke ascended to the stage for a mini-concert that concluded with his huge hit, “Blurred Lines.”

Heidi Klum and her new boyfriend, Vito Schnabel, kissed at their table. Adrian Grenier and Karolina Kurkova got up and began dancing (though not together). And Jessica Chastain and Milla Jovovich quickly moved to an after-party on the downstairs deck, where vodka was placed on every table, macarons were served by the truckload and dancing went on until dawn.

The grand total raised for the evening? Thirty-five million. Dollars, not euros.

Which is roughly $10 million more than the organization raised last year, and evidence of one thing above all else: Cannes just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Or, as Stefano Tonchi, the W editor, put it half-jokingly: “It’s only about the rich people. Don’t waste time on anybody else.”

If the Oscars is the Hollywood equivalent of prom night and graduation, then the Cannes Film Festival is spring break: a weeklong exaltation of global capitalism during which some of the world’s wealthiest, most talented and/or most beautiful people head not to Daytona Beach, Fla., but to the south of France.

Movie stars promote jewelry brands and, occasionally, become so inebriated that security guards have to hold them up as they near the exits of parties they’re at.

Movie studios spend untoward amounts of money on parties or on lawn space in front of the Carlton Hotel, on behalf of action-hero franchises (“Transformers: Age of Extinction,” “The Expendables 3”) that would seem to have little relationship with the very idea of a film festival.

Great movies debut here, too (and one major charity event takes place, as well; see above), but this week-and-a-half global bacchanal is fundamentally a tale of two cities. One group of visitors gets up at sunrise, slips into ill-fitting clothes, puts festival lanyards around their necks and heads straight into the darkness — otherwise known as the Grand Théâtre Lumière. The other group gets up at noon and heads to the terraces of the Hôtel du Cap or the Martinez Hotel for leisurely European lunches, after which they return to their rooms, pull out their Cavallis and Louboutins and depart in chauffeured Mercedes-Benzes to parties that go till dawn.

This is the week Jennifer Lawrence, arguably the most bankable female star today, is at a party in the hills, where she provides a metaphorical fan dance for every potential international distributor who might want to buy the rights to the latest installment of “The Hunger Games.”

This is the week Kylie Minogue is at a nightclub on the Croisette singing happy birthday to the ice-cream brand Magnum as it celebrates its 25th anniversary.

This is the week the talent agency Resolution tries to make a name for itself with helicopter service to and from its luncheon 40 minutes out of Cannes.

Fashion and Beauty at Cannes

Credit Julien Warnand/European Pressphoto Agency

And this is the week when the über-rich — like the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen; Revlon’s chairman, Ronald O. Perelman; and the socialite and songwriter Denise Rich — moor their gigantic yachts between Cannes and Antibes, hold ritzy affairs aboard and reel in supermodels, plastic-surgery victims, captains of industry and, occasionally, actual filmmakers who ooh and aah at the outrageous fortune of their hosts as they suck up fresh fish, compare notes on the night before and drain the bar before rushing off to the next thing.

American movies do sometimes manage to connect with both the critics and the glamour crowd. This past week, it was “Foxcatcher,” which got a 10-minute standing ovation at its premiere Monday night before a crowd that included Ms. Chastain, the designer Diane von Furstenberg and the French filmmaker Danièle Thompson.

On Tuesday, Sony Pictures Classics hosted a lunch on the movie’s behalf. Channing Tatum and Steve Carell, who star in it, were at neighboring tables. Bennett Miller, who directed it, mingled nearby.

In walked the veteran movie-screenings organizer Peggy Siegal, who explained that she was late because she had just been to see Marion Cotillard’s new movie, “Deux Jours, Une Nuit.” “She plays a factory worker, and she comes to the news conference dressed in a jewel-encrusted minidress,” she said of Ms. Cottillard. “She looked gorgeous, but she seemed like a disco queen selling a socialist movie.”

Baz Bamigboye, who was sitting nearby, has covered Cannes for many years for the Daily Mail. He admitted to some misgivings about the endless fashion parade the festival has become in recent years.

“Jane Fonda isn’t here to sell a movie, she’s here to sell L’Oréal,” Mr. Bamigboye said. “It makes me angry that people will go to a Chopard event rather than a three-and-a-half-hour Turkish masterpiece.”

And for sure, there was a lot of Chopard — an official partner of the festival — to go around this year. That jeweler’s first event took place on May 15 in conjunction with Variety, as Cate Blanchett posed in “shrimp earrings” and presented the Trophée Chopard to the young actors Logan Lerman and Adèle Exarchopoulos.

Its second event took place on Sunday in a suite at the Martinez Hotel, where the brand organized what the invitation said was an “intimate dinner.”

Intimate, in this case, involved wall-mounted televisions showing a loop of Uma Thurman and Ms. Blanchett in Chopard. Cases of jewelry were lit from above like Porsches in a car dealership. Colin Firth and his wife, Livia, co-hosted. And during the meal, a businessman from Beijing happily told tablemates that his custom-made Roberto Cavalli dinner jacket cost him €68,000, about $95,000. (“It took 11 months to make,” he said.)

On Monday, the brand held its third — and biggest — event, as it took over a nearby hangar and making it look like the set of a big-budget movie. Its centerpiece was a large airplane with vines running down the side and a D.J. booth in the cockpit. The plane looked as if it had crashed, which, given recent news, was perhaps not so tasteful. But it didn’t seem to generate much controversy, at least not in Cannes.

Another “intimate” affair over the last week was a filmmakers’ dinner at the Hôtel du Cap held by the branding consultant Charles Finch in conjunction with Chivas Regal. Naomi Watts was at a table with Harvey Weinstein. The art collector Jean Pigozzi passed by the director Alfonso Cuarón. And nearby was Peter Brant II, playing a parlor game popular among his young socialite set: I spy a billionaire.

He found one on a yacht in the distance owned by James Packer, the Australian casino king. “He’s friends with my dad,” said Mr. Brant, referring to Peter Brant, the newsprint magnate and art collector. “It actually has a basketball court.”

A friend approached and asked what on earth the younger Mr. Brant was doing in the south of France. “I’m here for the glitz-glamour and the glamour-glitz,” Mr. Brant said, reverting to his trademark patois.

Also, he had to attend the premiere of “The Homesman,” which was directed by Tommy Lee Jones and which Mr. Brant’s father helped to produce. If only the young fashion tyke could even remember who was in it. “Sandra Bullock,” he said.

“No,” a friend said. “Hilary Swank.”

“Oh, right,” Mr. Brant said, laughing.

Then, he moved on to a more pressing matter: what to wear at the Vanity Fair party and over the course of the week.

A version of this article appears in print on May 25, 2014, on page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: