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Party Coverage: Scene City

By RACHEL DONADIO

ANTIBES, France — Around 11 on Saturday night, Mary J. Blige walked into the party hosted by Vanity Fair and Chopard at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc. Her wingwoman was her sister, LaTonya Blige-DaCosta, who has written lyrics for some of her songs.

“I’m wearing Balmain,” Ms. Blige said of her short black dress, “but I can’t show it off because it’s too cold.” She wrapped a white shawl over her shoulders and looked across the deck. There were yachts moored in the bay below, and a view of Cannes in the distance.

Ms. Blige was a guest at what has become one of the most exclusive parties of the Cannes Film Festival, held each year by Vanity Fair at this luxury hotel overlooking the Mediterranean. Surrounded by towering pines, the hotel was made famous by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who spent time in the area in the 1920s with his family and immortalized it in “Tender Is the Night.”

This year’s party brought together stars at every point in their careers.

Earlier, Al Gore had emerged from an even more exclusive dinner with his girlfriend, Elizabeth Keadle. He is at Cannes presenting “An Inconvenient Sequel,” a follow-up to his documentary on climate change. If he had any thoughts on the state of the world, he wasn’t saying. “I’m not giving interviews,” he said, as someone offered him a cigar.

Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s editor in chief, was. Considering the news coming out of the White House, “It’s a good time to leave the country,” he said, as he smoked a cigarette on the deck.

Mr. Carter hosted the dinner with Richard Plepler, the chairman of HBO. The dinner tables were decorated with pale pink peonies, whose scent wafted into the cool seaside air. The guests ate artichoke risotto, lobster or fried zucchini flowers, followed by berry tarts.

The legendary Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, who appears on this year’s festival poster, walked by. “I always wear Armani,” she said.

As the party picked up, Kendall Jenner posed for photos by the bar and Clint Eastwood sauntered in. In a room full of champagne glasses, he was drinking beer from a bottle. The festival was showing “Unforgiven,” for the 25th anniversary of its release. “It’s hard to believe it was 25 years ago,” Mr. Eastwood said. “It seems like it flew by.”

As Alejandro González Iñárritu ordered a tequila at the bar and Rosamund Pike floated by in a long white gown that billowed in the breeze, Noah Baumbach appeared with Greta Gerwig, in a flowy silver dress and silver spike heels. They hurt her feet, Ms. Gerwig said, so she headed outside to take them off, alighting on a bench to chat with Julianne Moore.

Around 1 a.m., the dance floor began to fill up. The Mediterranean pine trees behind the terrace were lit from below, shifting from pink to blue to green. David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” moved to the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.”