There was just one other person in the women's toilets squeezed, like all European toilets, into a corner of the Cannes Palais that can only be located with a Where's Wally-style search. Formidably tall, glowing with gorgeousness, visibly pregnant and keen to discuss my hair colour: it's Blake Lively. The whole toilet area is the size of a wardrobe. We can't not talk. It's a Cannes glamour moment, the kind of thing people imagine happens all the time at the film festival – cocktails with Brad! a selfie with George and Amal! – but actually hardly ever does.
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Of course, I just want to ask why she's ducked out of the gala screening of Café Society, Woody Allen's new film in which she features as a '30s socialite, to a grungy toilet in the next-door building that's only about as wide as she is tall. "I had to change my dress before dinner," she explains. She couldn't eat in the clinging spangled dress she wore up the red carpet: it's too tight. "And I'm really hungry." Trapped inside a dress! As she says in the interview we do next day, these issues of the famous are "champagne problems". It still seems a melancholy fate.
For those of us who will never have to worry about splitting the seams of an Atelier Versace frock, dinners in Cannes consist mostly of a free espresso from the counter in the press room and a baguette eaten out of the bag. The exception was opening night, when the festival invited press and other guests to a party in a beachside restaurant with tables of meats and cheeses, a pasta station and as many strawberries as you could eat while a band pumped out Daft Punk's Get Lucky and '80s disco hits. Nobody famous was there, but you could almost forget you had to be in the theatre at 8am next day.
No question, there are fewer people in Cannes, post Charlie Hebdo. Police security preparations, which included a run-through of a simulated terrorist attack that was filmed and became an internet sensation, seem to have worried potential visitors more than reassuring them. There are no numbers yet to prove it, but all festival veterans know that it is easier to walk down the street, that the general hubbub sounds more French than American, and that everyone has heard of some latecomer to the festival paying peanuts for a villa where the usual tenants had bailed.
Actually, apart from some very assiduous sniffer dogs and armed police in the Palais, visible security measures are not very different from other years: the elegant women on the cinema doors peer a little further into everyone's bags, that's all – and if the festival follows its usual trajectory, their enthusiasm will have waned by next week. What festival-goers assumed was the flagship of the war on terror – a vessel painted in camouflage colours anchored in the bay near a cruise ship – turned out to belong to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and thus, given that Sea Shepherd is often dubbed an eco-terrorist organisation, ostensibly the enemy.
Of course, they're nothing of the kind. Sea Shepherd, which uses its ships to disrupt whalers and fish poachers, is campaigning against an amusement park with performing sea mammals called Marineland in the nearby Riviera town of Antibes. They're also pretty much into show biz. Campaign supporter Pamela Anderson will be here in a couple of days to do publicity; the ship itself is named Sam Simon after the late Simpsons co-creator, who bought and donated it. That's Cannes for you: just when you think it's all about meeting stars in the toilet, it turns out to be a serious kind of place after all.
