Climbing the steps of the Cannes Film Festival is a dream for many people. The host Ariane Massenet had this chance but everything did not go as planned…
She has been a leading face of the small screen for several decades now. Ariane Massenet went through You can’t please everyone (France 3), Little secrets between friends (Paris Première) as well as The Grand Journal (Channel +). But, at one time, it was in the shadows that she worked. And his first climb of the steps at the Cannes Film Festival is unforgettable…
Ariane Massenet’s memorable first Cannes Film Festival
We are in 1995 and Ariane Massenet is still at the start of her career in show business. She is Jeanne Moreau’s assistant when the legendary actress is chosen as president of the jury at Cannes. Obviously, she therefore accompanied the actress on the Croisette. Invited, on May 20, 2024, by Maïtena Biraben in her new media called LadiesAriane Massenet recounted her funny experience at the most famous film festival in the world.
“Last day, Jeanne said to me: ‘For the last evening, I would be happy to go up the stairs with you.'”, she begins by saying. Excited and anxious at the same time, the journalist and host accepts the invitation. She takes out her only slightly chic outfit, an orange silk ensemble. “Trousers and a little jacket, I told myself I was going to wear that”, she remembers. An outfit that did not go unnoticed…
“Everyone says: ‘Jeanne, Jeanne…’ And I’m three steps behind her, because I didn’t dare to be next to her, I didn’t see the legitimacy. So I stay behind, and There I hear the photographers: ‘The orange one, get out!'”At the beginning, Ariane Massenet does not understand that “the orange“, it’s her. “I don’t react, because I don’t think it’s me!”, she explains, before hitting and feeling humiliated on the red carpet. Fortunately, today she laughs about it!
Ariane Massenet and her “very tender” relationship with Jeanne Moreau
An anecdote that Ariane Massenet likes to tell. In the show Immedias on Canal +, the journalist already returned in 2012 to this famous climb of the steps with Jeanne Moreau, who died in 2017, at the age of 89. She returned to the genesis of their collaboration, that famous year: “She needed someone to relay to Canal +. I was the link with her.”
Ariane Massenet was already full of praise for the star of Jules and Jim : “I was extremely impressed by her, extremely shy. And we had a very lovely, very tender relationship. I really got along well. I was her little hand. I guided her and she took me: I walked up the stairs for the first time with her.” The big leap into the world of the 7th art for the presenter, now 58 years old. “I had the impression of touching French cinema as a whole”she said, when she herself became an actress.
