For the sake of its own dignity, the Cannes Film Festival should impose limits upon itself in terms of providing a forum for questionable, possibly tacky films to make a pre-release splash. I know very little about the upcoming Sex and the City movie, but my first reaction to reading Elizabeth Snead‘s 3.14 Envelope story that the 5.30 New Line release might make its worldwide debut in Cannes was “oh, no…bad idea.”

Snead quoted Sarah Jessica Parker ( a.k.a., Carrie Bradshaw) as saying “we are all still figuring out what we want in terms of the movie…whether it’s at Cannes two weeks before it opens domestically…it will all shake down in the next week or so.”
Speaking at Showest, Parker told Snead that “a handful of people have seen it and have been very surprised by the seriousness [of the film]…there’s something that happens in this movie and it’s really about realizing your own complicity and disappointment…you know the necessity of friends, but at a certain point, as a grown-up person, you have to take care of yourself. There’s still plenty of ripe old salty dirty stuff. But I think it’s a really smart story and I think Michael Patrick wrote a beautiful screenplay. I feel like he wrote the role of a lifetime for me and it was just such an amazing experience.”
It won’t be a “tragedy” if Sex and the City goes to Cannes. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is being shown there, after all. The festival screened Ocean’s 13 last year, and Brett Ratner‘s X-Men 3: The Last Stand and The DaVinci Code the year before. Still, Sex in the City at Cannes would drop the prestige levels by a notch or two. C’mon…you know it would. Nothing dramatic or devastating, but it would be seen as sliding a little bit closer to the swamp.