At 9:40 on Sunday morning, the stage on the beach was predictably empty. Viewers of one or more of the countless television specials broadcast from the Cannes Film Festival will, no doubt, recognize this stage, even though they usually see it later in the day, bathed in floodlights,  and occupied by television personalities of various degrees of vacuousness, interviewing an endless series of stars and starlets who desperately try to come across as amazingly nonchalant. The rule seems to be that those who are the most famous tend to be the least blasé, presumably because they don’t have anything to prove any longer. Be that as it may, I think I like the stage better this way: affording a view of the bay of Cannes with the Esterel mountains in the background.