Suggesting a lavish gathering of wealthy celebrities amid a non-stop media circus might be attractive to thieves and malcontents, this year’s Cannes film festival has already had two major security incidents. First, yesterday’s screening of Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring was accompanied by the theft of around $1 million in Chopard jewelry—a heist that might have made for a clever tie-in publicity stunt, were it not an actual burglary that involved ripping the safe from the wall of a hotel room occupied by a Chopard employee, who was hosting a Cannes gala elsewhere at the time. While the investigation is still ongoing, Chopard has already been downplaying the value of the stolen jewels and denying reports that they had them on hand to be loaned to A-list celebrities (without explaining why they had them), presumably to avoid everyone drawing the comparisons to The Bling Ring that everyone is making anyway.
And then today a live TV interview on France’s Canal+ was interrupted as gunshots rang out, sending actor Christoph Waltz and members of the audience scurrying for safety. You can see the brief melee in the video below (though the gunshots cannot be heard). Police arrested the gunman, discovering he was only firing blanks from a starter pistol while also brandishing a fake grenade. (In the words of the ever-deadpan, ennui-ridden French police, “It really appears to be a crazy guy.”) Fortunately no one was injured, and both show and film festival resumed, hoping that things don’t get any crazier from here. But already that whole “Lars Von Trier says some stuff about Nazis” year is looking really tame by comparison.