Last year around this time, when cinephiles come to canoodle with the French Riviera, Brad Pitt walked the famed steps of the Palais des Festivals – no, floated, like Nureyev in evening wear – with Jennifer Aniston. Jen wore a whiter-than-white gown that if it wasn’t Vera Wang should have been. Brad wore a beautiful tuxedo. They looked like they’d arrived to renew their vows.

There was no second, ersatz wedding that day when Troy world-premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Now it seems there will never be. But isn’t all the world a sound stage for a wedding at Cannes? Or at least a trillion courtships blooming in the French sun – courtships between photogs and flacks, journos and stars, filmmakers and money blokes – all of them calculating moves on a familiar grid of love and longing, jealousy and deceit.

Cannes is not just the circus on the Côte d’Azur that the tabloids and TV tell us it is. It’s also a market – a place  of pitching, watching, meeting, buying and begging movies – that’s fascinating to observe. The meetings unfold at the hotels that gleam like teeth on the Croisette. These dances only last a few minutes as Producer A flirts with Potential Collaborator B before quickly cutting in on Potential Collaborators C, D and E through Z. They often go through the perfunctory ordering of lattes, rarely finishing them. On the great line graph of love, these meetings seem to moi a cinematic form of speed dating.

Love unrequited is a major theme at the festival. In a place where party invite-wrangling requires the stamina of The Amazing Race, where the time-honoured French tradition of humiliation is practised by many a clipboard wielder, Cannes is sort of like dating George Clooney: You’re not going to get that wedding ring, sister. Ever.

The social primate pyramid is so firmly entrenched in these parts that there’s even a posh hotel where the fabulous stay that, amazingly, only accepts cold, hard cash: the famous, frolicsome, out-of-the-way Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc. The grounds there make the Lord of the Rings set look like a basement apartment. Last year, I saw Cameron Diaz woman-handling Justin Timberlake there and Jack Black cannonballing off a 100-or-so-storey cliff into the pool. A hotel where envelopes stuffed with Gs is the only way to pay is such a deliciously snobby idea I’m sure even William Thackeray is drooling in his grave.

Like most affairs of the heart, which have their own secret language, and all weddings, which contain their own special mores, l’amour Cannes has its own dress-up code. Unlike Sundance (where parkas constitute black tie) and the Toronto fest (where you can throw a blazer over your Levis), here women get seriously dolled up and men must wear tuxedos to the Palais des Festivals. Tuxedos with bow ties. One year when I was trying to get into the new Almodóvar, I fell for Monique (Melanie? Marie?), who does brisk business from her bow tie cart right at the foot of the theatre. I had foolishly worn a tux and open-neck shirt – very Tom Ford. (Presumably, only Tom Ford can get away with that in Cannes.)

If we accept that Cannes is a wedding with Fellini officiating or possibly just a blind date from hell/heaven, then Monique (Melanie? Marie?) – at €80 a silky pop – is definitely one of the only people here getting lucky.

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Shinan Govani is the Scene columnist for the National Post and frequently appears on television commenting on celebrities and the social whirl. Write him at sgovani@enroutemag.net.