Why the Cannes Film Festival Is the Perfect Setting for ‘The White Lotus’ Season 4

In my experience, the Cannes Film Festival is a place of jarring contradictions. In the same humid evening, you can ascend the ginormous red carpet of the Palais des Festivals into the premiere of a devastating drama about wealth inequality, tearfully applaud for 15 minutes in your strictly-enforced tux, and later find yourself at a bafflingly expensive afterparty where the tables are stacked with 67 shades of macaroons, Veuve flowing on an infinite tap. The beleaguered local waiting staff look like they resent the very fiber of your being, and if you’ve even a glimmer of self-awareness, it’s hard not to agree with them. Film journalists and student enthusiasts who have maxed out their credit cards to stay in ludicrously overpriced AirBnBs, crammed seven-a-room like corpses in a morgue, rub shoulders with ultra-wealthy oligarchs whose dick-measuring mega yachts loom larger than a row of IMAX screens. It’s intoxicating. It’s fun. You’ll never feel more broke.

There aren’t many places that stand as such a profound symbol of the chasm between rich and poor as the French Riviera, especially not in early May, when Cannes clicks the bourgeois indulgence into overdrive. Hence why Mike White has turned to the festival as the next setting for his anthological class-satire-come-whodunnit The White Lotus, the fourth season now filming along the Côte d’Azur, from Cannes to St. Tropez and Monaco. Set across a week of the festival, per the official logline recently shared by HBO, the series will see its new ensemble descend upon two of the region’s most extravagant hotels: the Airelles Château de la Messardière, standing in for the “White Lotus du Cap,” and the Hôtel Martinez, playing the part of the “White Lotus Cannes.” IRL, a night at the former will set you back around $2,800. For the latter, it’s over 15 grand for the six-night minimum at peak festival time.

The luxury hotel settings of The White Lotus have long served as potent incubators for the tensions on which White thrives: money, class, race, sexuality, gender; underpaid staff and their über-privileged guests, whose luxurious lives insulate them from self-reflection, their identities forged by socioeconomic status rather than human substance. Families who would rather die than live like the 99 percent. Monied couples whose opulence papers over the cracks of their fractured bonds. And with a place like Cannes, there’s even more thematic meat on the bone. You can throw in questions of celebrity, the pressure cooker of film publicity tours, the absurd backslapping of stopwatched standing ovations, and beach parties wherein everyone is looking for someone more influential than the last to share their rosé with. (A well-weathered journalist friend once told me about what he called the “Cannes stare,” or something to that effect, where you’ll be talking with someone at an event, and every 30 seconds or so, their eyes will frantically dart over your shoulder, scanning for a bigger fish. You soon learn not to take it personally.)

While the show takes in all of these themes as a rule, there tends to be a more specific throughline that makes each season distinct. When The White Lotus went to Thailand, new-age spirituality came to the fore; back in Sicily, it was all about sex and gender politics. If it didn’t already seem obvious enough that a season in Cannes will turn to those aforementioned ideas of movie stardom in the modern age, White has essentially confirmed as much. “It’s a bit about fame, about who has the world’s attention, who is the plus-one, and how that can organize a relationship,” he told W in February. “Some people are satisfied with the love of just an intimate partner, and some people need the love of strangers and a bigger kind of attention.” Maybe we’ll see Steve Coogan check in as a veteran arthouse auteur whose long-awaited passion project stinks out the Croisette. Vincent Cassel could go full meta as an aging French film star gunning for a career renaissance—or maybe he’ll be the next White Lotus manager, torn asunder by the sudden slew of Hollywood VIPs. TikTok influencers and Instagram looksmaxxers could try to outmog the A-listers of yesteryear. Whatever the case, rest assured: it’ll all be a bloodbath. Welcome to Cannes.

This article originally appeared in British GQ.