On the last Saturday in May, as the sun set over the azure waters of the French Riviera, the Croisette would have worn a deserted look, as tourists, media and celebrities packed their backpacks or Louis Vuitton luggage, as the case may be, and bade farewell to the 76th Cannes Film Festival, held every year at the resort city that hugs a neat curve of France’s south-east Mediterranean coastline. The red carpet, mottled with stiletto jabs, would have been rolled up, denuding the renovated Palais des Festivals building of the pomp and grandeur it had sported since May 16.
But as life plods back to normal, the kaleidoscope of images generated during that fortnight remains embedded in our consciousness, making us, in fact, view celebrity life refracted through the camera’s lens. More so with the delicious prospect of stumbling onto the quotidian which, thanks to the histrionics on the ’gram, then often gets transformed and metastasised into…