Irecently received an email from a representative at Barrière, a French five-star hotel group, asking if I’d like to go horse riding on a beach at sunset, watch some films and have dinner with Pamela Anderson. My enthusiastic RSVP bit my kind host’s arm clean off.

The destination: Deauville, a tastefully-timbered town on the Normandy coast which is filled with Hèrmes, Louis Vuitton and Longchamp stores and sail boats clanking in the wind. There’s also a long and wide strip of golden beach.

The occasion: the 51 st annual Deauville American Film Festival , or Festival du Cinéma Américain de Deauville , which stands entirely apart from the flash and brash paparazzi-plagued shindigs in Cannes and Venice, where who wore what and why and tabloid gossip overshadows the filmmaking and stor

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