Life Imitates Art: Robberies At Cannes Film Festival

Purportedly $1.4 million dollars (that's this many -- $1,400,000) in Chopard jewels was stolen last night out of a hotel room at the Novotel Hotel in Cannes, France during the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Coincidentally, the film opening the Un Certain Regard (A certain glance) category at Cannes Film Festival hours before the robbery: Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, a film about ritzy robberies in celebrities homes.

How did the thief/thieves extract these jewels?
They ripped the damn safe from the wall, and walked the fuck out.

Gangsta style. "Fuck yo safe."

The robbery was most likely executed some time between 7 pm Thursday and 3 am Friday, while the hotel guest from Chopard was out of their room. Most likely at the opulent Chopard Gala across town at the 5-star Hotel Martinez.

2013 Palme d'Or Trophy

Chopard, a swiss-based watch and fine jewelry maker, is an official sponsor and manufactures the Cannes' gold and crystal Palme d'Or trophy. Starting in 1979, the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival was initiated to bring about new genres and showcase innovation in storytelling and film-making in the festival.

It runs parallel to the In Competition selection of the festival which screens the main crop of films and hopefuls looking to gain world-wide recognition and win the highest honor there: the coveted Palme d'Or trophy.

Model Carla Delevinge

Julianne Moore and Carla Delevinge and Cindy Crawford are among some of the names sporting wear from the Chopard collection. The jewels from the safe had nothing to do with celebrity outfitting or the trophy for the Un Certain Regard winner. Those are "safe" say Chopard.

"The jewels stolen are not part of the collection of jewels that are worn by actresses during the Cannes film festival," Chopard spokeswoman Raffaella Rossiello told reporters in a brief statement Friday.

Every year at the festival, dresses and jewelry are given out on loan by high-line and prominent international clothing lines and jeweler.

"Caroline Scheufele, co-vice-president of Chopard, told the Evening Standard earlier this week that the firm prepares for Cannes by taking requests from actors and their stylists: "The Americans are so organised. They know what dress they're wearing months before and they tell us how their hair will be."

The purpose is to tout the name of the elite jeweler and display the fine wear and add to the women's fashion and elegance and blah, blah, barf. But for every pose on the carpet in festivals throughout the years, in a somewhat related note, you get this at Venice in 2011. Oooff. . .

Police and officials have been scouring the city's traffic and store front security cameras as well as the hotel's to see if they can put (if any) leads together at all. Cmdr. Bernard Mascarelli, a judicial police spokesman in the nearby city of Nice, said he didn't know the exact type of jewelry taken, or its exact value. "Numbers have been put forward that we're still trying to verify, but the figure of $1 million ... we're in that range," he said. Jean-Michel Caillau, a state prosecutor in nearby Grasse who is leading the investigation, said early estimates were that the loot could have been worth as much as $1.4 million.  

"It seems pretty unlikely to us that it was just one person," Mascarelli said. "Apparently this (hotel guest) was someone who was targeted because it wasn't someone who had been seeking attention. ... There must have been either inside complicity, or people who were in contact with this person and knew that the person had jewels," he said.

Some officials have already begun to suspect inside jobs in either Chopard itself or possibly the hotel, but no details have been released. Jean-Michel Caillau, a state prosecutor in nearby Grasse who is leading the investigation, said the theft appeared to have taken place early on Friday morning - around the same time as Chopard's gala was running late at the 5-star Hotel Martinez across town.

And according to The Guardian, this is certainly not the first robbery in Cannes of a hefty dollar amount. 

"It's not the first major robbery in Cannes. During last year's film festival the international Senegalese footballers, Souleymane Diawara and Mamadou Niang, had four luxury watches worth around £340,000 stolen from their villa on the outskirts of Cannes. In February this year, thieves in broad daylight robbed a shop on the Croisette and made off with 150 luxury watches estimated to be worth about £800,0000. In 2009, an armed gang stole several million pounds worth of jewels from a Cartier shop on the Croisette. 

Chopard itself recorded around £6m worth of jewels stolen from its flagship Paris store in 2009 by a man in his 50s who casually walked in wearing a suit and Borsalino-style hat, passing himself off as a customer before pulling out a handgun. He was suspected to be part of an international gang known as the Pink Panthers. The stolen jewellery has never been recovered."

Jeezus. How many films can we get out of this article?


And now, as the title suggested, here's the full-circle part. A most exquisitely shot sequence from Brian De Palma's 2002 Femme Fatale. I'll let the frames speak for themselves. And yes, not only did this robbery-in-film below occur at Cannes, the items stolen were also a Chopard set of jewels as well.

Coincidence? Yes. But as I said: Life imitates art.

(EDIT: This clip of the robbery sequence (that can be found in the beginning of the film, I URGE you to find it, damn it is well shot.) has a copywrite strike against it. Therefor, I can no longer keep it active on my Youtube account. I have no fucking clue how so many millions of others host entire films free of red-tape on their channels without penalty, but I shall look further into this issue.

My apologies,
                     M