Who's that girl on the Cannes red carpet? You may well ask
By Mike Davidson CANNES, France (Reuters) - With a click of her blue-bob wig, Marie Parie turns to face the tuxedo-clad photographers at a premiere in Cannes as others on the red carpet pause to wonder where they might have seen her before. The truth is, Parie is not really famous but is one of many ambitious young performers hoping for a career-boosting break at Cannes, where she has blagged her way onto the red carpet almost every night of the two-week festival. With an arm draped over a security guard outside the Palais des Festivals, Parie sings a few lines of her song “Ice Cream”, a saucy rap song that had some chart success last year and has attracted 100,000 hits on YouTube. “I want to see French people smiling and laughing,” Parie told Reuters as she posed for photos with tourists on the Croisette, her love-heart sunglasses and lace hat topped with a French tricolor making sure she gets noticed, and possibly taken for a star. "This is the red carpet - this is where we go, it's really nice," she said, pointing to the steps that this year have carried Dustin Hoffman, Will Smith and Nicole Kidman into the heart of the world's most prestigious film festival. For Parie, born in Paris and now living in Los Angeles, it's not about the movies, it's about the exposure and the experience. "Basically, today is a different movie, I don’t know yet which one. But yesterday was awesome, it was amazing, it was packed. It's just great to go there, it's a great feeling." (Writing by Robin Pomeroy; Editing by David Goodman)
