Cannes of worms: The ugly truth about the world's most famous film festival



Models on the make, seedy millionaires and porn between the premieres - the Mail's LIZ JONES reveals the putrid reality that lies beneath the glamour at Cannes

Over dinner with a movie producer in a bistro called Le Petit Paris, just off the famous Croisette - the strip of swanky hotels, designer boutiques, bars and clubs in Cannes - we watch as guests spill out onto the street from the fourth Indiana Jones movie, screened as part of the 61st annual film festival.

There are beautiful women with tiny bodies and big breasts on the arms of men in dinner jackets. There is a full moon, and you can hear the waves crashing on to the beach a few feet away.

Penelope Cruz dazzles in the rain at Cannes

I'm about to go to a party hosted by Boujis nightclub, where, I've been promised, not only Harrison Ford will be holding court, but also Gael Garcia Bernal, Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman.

As I'm sitting watching all these rich, successful, famous, rich (did I already say that?) people waft past, I am thinking: this is probably the most glamorous place in the world to be right now. Scrub that. This is the only place to be.

But what I should have known is that the more lavish the occasion, the more exclusive the invite, the more velvet ropes you have to duck under, the more tall, inscrutable men with walkie-talkies you have to inveigle your way past - the more putrid the reality that lies beneath.

Let me give you an example, courtesy of my movie producer dinner date (who is constantly looking over my shoulder in case someone more interesting hovers into view; a common behavioural tic in Cannes), that illustrates how dissatisfied all this hobnobbing can make you.

'You can't just go to a party on the beach,' he says, drawing on a cigarette (people here don't give much truck to the smoking ban, or to rules about any illegal substances). 'You have to go to a party on a yacht. But it has to be a private party, and it can't be on anything smaller than an 85ft yacht.'

'Oh, really?' I say. 'I get sick on boats.' Seemingly deaf, he then filled me in on the hierarchy of the yachts moored off the Croisette. Frankly, those owned by Formula One boss Flavio Briatore (host, week, to British pop star Lily Allen) and Roberto Cavalli (host to Leonardo DiCaprio's new model girlfriend, Bar Rafaeli; what did Leo do, trade in Gisele Bundchen like a two-year-old Golf?) are not quite yah enough.

Lily Allen takes the helm in Fabio Briatore's yacht this week

But the most important fixture and fitting on a yacht off the coast of Cannes? 'Hot and cold running supermodels,' says my date. 'You cannot, as a man, turn up without a supermodel on your arm. They simply won't let you on.'

So I ask him, can you get me on a yacht? He looks a little dubious, but - and you will be very proud of me - I do get on a yacht. And this is what I find.

First of all, every woman needs to have stashed a pair of deck shoes in her bag. Once on board (you are supposed to alight, not sprawl, despite wearing stilettos), you promptly swop over your shoes (Jade Jagger, being rather short, refuses to take off her heels on one yacht, and promptly falls over).



Having sorted out your feet, you then look up, to find you are surrounded by a sea (not the azure Mediterranean, another sea) of teenage, Eastern European models, many of whom you might recognise from the catwalk and magazine fashion spreads. And you are also surrounded by lots of very old, very rich men with mouths like tortoises and skin to match.

Talk on board is not about whether Angelina Jolie's new film Changeling is any good, or whether you have you seen the new Woody Allen (which is a real return to form, apparently), but of how much money you have and how many women you are about to have; the women in question don't actually say very much at all.

I stand next to a hedge fund manager who has invested heavily in film, and he is telling me that he has just ordered a G650. I ask whether he will have to pay the new £25 congestion charge, and he wanders off, scratching his head.

(It is only the next day, upon reading in the International Herald Tribune about how the private jet industry, despite the economic downturn, is now worth four times what it was in 1996, that I realise he wasn't talking about a car.)

Natalie Portman and Eva Herzigova showed off legs - and shoulders - on the Cannes red carpet this week

Another business mogul is talking about how he has just spent $30million doing up the garden of his house on the Cote d'Azur. Goodness, I think, how many perlagoniums do you need?

I talk later to a dark-eyed, Brooke Shields-browed beauty called Mahee, the winner of a German TV modelling contest who used to date Max Wiedemann, the producer of the Oscar-winning The Lives Of Others (all the models are defined not by their magazine covers but by their boyfriends).

'Why on earth,' I say, 'would you want to go to one of those yacht parties?' 'It's nice,' she says. ( Conversation is not always a model's strong point.)

I ask how old she is and she says (bearing in mind she looks all of 18): 'I don't want to say my age. People will start to judge me... I might not get a new ad campaign. You know how it is.'

A director in earshot yawns and adds: 'They all want to act. Failing that, all they want to do is marry a rich man.'

It is the sheer number of very young women being paraded around town by men who make Clint Eastwood look sprightly that turns my stomach.

Earlier in the week, I had been having a drink in the bar of the Hotel du Cap in nearby Antibes.

This is the hotel where Angelina and Brad were holed up, and where Scarlett Johansson demanded she be allowed to stay - until her studio baulked at the fact that a cottage in the grounds can cost the equivalent of more than £3,000 a night and a flute of Taittinger £24.

There I was, watching the stars going up and down in the glass lift, when I noticed yet another teenage model with a man who looked old enough to be her grandfather. No one batted an eye.



Sharon Stone: Feminism works in mysterious ways in Cannes

But when Sharon Stone had been in this very bar with a lover who was obviously 20 years her junior, and at the end of the evening had stood up, raised an immaculate eyebrow and summoned him to bed, everyone looked so shocked it was as if she had again gone out without her knickers on.



While the film industry claims to attract the brightest and the best, it operates in a weird time warp, before feminism was invented.



And while beautiful women all want to be in the movies, rich men all want to make them. I ask my producer friend whether a party is quite the right place, being so noisy, to pitch an idea to a mega-rich investor. He looks at me as if I'm mad. 'We don't pitch at the parties. We get them to trust us.'



And how do you do that? 'We take drugs together.' And when you do finally get to pitch, what.. . well, floats their yacht?



'If you want your movie to get made, you have to pitch an idea that is either about the environment or about pornography. Basically, you have to make an investor feel either guilty or horny.'

The next night, after drinks at the Carlton Hotel (where, confusingly for the chambermaids, both Maradona and Madonna have taken suites; Madonna had sent her personal trainer along the night before she arrived to 'set up' her exercise equipment), I go to Jade Jagger's bash at a dreadful, draughty nightclub called (and you should really bow down to the ingenuity of whoever thought up the name) VIP.

There, I watch an up-and-coming British actor disappear into the gents for 30 minutes, only to return ostentatiously wiping his nose.



I am asked to pay €1,200 (£958) just to sit at a table. 'It has the best view,' mewed the hostess. 'Of what?' I ask.



P Diddy: A view worth paying £958 for?

'P Diddy.'



I leave before the whole scene becomes too sordid. I am tired of all the young women in sprayed-on jeans with equally sprayed-on smiles.



Actually, after only a few days in Cannes, I start to become quite picky about the parties I go to. If the star is just going to be, say, Mischa Barton, I can't be bothered. If it is going to be Clint Eastwood - whom I spotted earlier in the week helping himself at the buffet ( goodness, even I don't do buffets) - then I might just turn up.



The best party all week - after the one thrown by GQ magazine to celebrate the making of Toby Young's How To Lose Friends And Alienate People - is that thrown in honour of Gwyneth Paltrow and her new film, Two Lovers. Gwyneth is one of the most gracious of the stars I come across all week. She grins at me. 'You wrote you hate my shoes! And you're right, they really hurt!'



The talk of Cannes is how the stars' relationships are faring. My new TV presenter friend says: 'A cable channel has hired an interpreter of body language to spy on Angelina and Brad to find out whether he loves her.'



'Let me tell you,' adds a producer, 'I went to Brad and Jen's wedding, and they snogged for an hour. At their own wedding! That must be true love!'



'But I hear Jen is so boring,' interrupts my friend.



And so it goes on: the shredding of the people who have made it to the top, wanting to bring them right back down to the bottom again.



Suffering for fashion: Gwyneth in yet another pair of towering heels

The next few nights become a bit of a blur. I go to a party at the Century club, before swinging by the Roman Polanski post-premiere do on Nikki Beach. (I overhear one bearded German film critic, on being barred entry, saying within earshot of everybody: 'Well, who wants to party with a perv anyway?')



Then, on Wednesday night, I try to blag my way into the Soho House party celebrating the best of British film, to no avail. 'What makes you think I'm not a model?' I ask the bouncer.



'About 20 years,' he says, without missing a beat.



I see a lot of sad things during my time in Cannes. At the Boujis party on Sunday night, I spot the actor who played Sanjay in EastEnders just wandering around, carrying a backpack, with nobody talking to him, nobody even knowing his name.

I see lots of beautiful girls being told they don't make the grade, and being sent back to shore on tiny motor boats, suddenly feeling the cold (it's been raining all week).



I see Michelle Williams braving the red carpet to promote her new film as shouts from the paparazzi, begging her to give just one soundbite about the death of her former fiancee; Heath Ledger, rain down on her narrow shoulders like hail.



I hear that one British music star who cheated on his wife with another star (please keep up) had a liaison here in a hotel room with a pretty blonde French girl. More broken dreams, more broken promises. Par for the course here in Cannes.



The most poignant moment, though, and one that seems to sum up what Cannes is all about, is when I sit in a booth with Mike Tyson. He has big, soft hands and is wearing an immaculate grey suit with an ironed white hanky in his top pocket.



He is the subject of a documentary by James Toback, the film that receives the biggest standing ovation all week. I ask him to sum up what it's about, and he says: 'It's about how I was really sweet and nice when I started out, then became a monster and lost all my money.'



And what are you like now? 'Oh, I'm sweet again.'



As I leave his booth, I bump into two predatory blondes. 'No black man has ever turned me down,' says one, a glint in her eye. 'He's a hit, right? His film's a hit?'



With that, I walk back to my hotel room, glad for once that I am on the outside, looking in. The face of Cannes might be tanned, toned and bejewelled, but underneath it is very ugly indeed.



