Cannes 2016: Reporter's diary

The 69th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, one of the key events in the international entertainment calendar, is taking place in the south of France.

Having slapped on his sun hat and dusted down his tux, the BBC's Neil Smith is on the Croisette to bring you all the news, gossip and glamour from this annual cinema showcase.

Follow his adventures here and on the entertainment news team's Twitter feed.

WEDNESDAY 11 MAY, 1400 BST (1500 LOCAL TIME)Woody Allen was on predictably mordant form at today's Café Society press conference, describing life as "fraught with peril, sadness and cruelt"."You can look at life as amusing with a farcical element to it," he told journalists. "But it can also be very sad if you penetrate it."The veteran director also had some slightly prescriptive words for stars who complain about press intrusion into their private lives.

"Celebrities often kvetch about the lack of privacy and the paparazzi but these are not life-threatening problems," he went on.

"There are upsides and downsides to fame, but the perks outweigh the downsides."Café Society, like several of Woody's films, involves a relationship between an older man and a younger woman - a recurring trope that a couple of (female) journalists gently took him to task about.

Allen, though, said he "wouldn't hesitate" to write a film in which the ages were reversed, but said it was "not a commonly seen thing".

"It's a perfectly valid idea to have the age difference in that direction," he said as he sat on a dais between Kristen Stewart, 26, and Blake Lively, 28.

"I just don't have the experience or the material to draw on."

I'll be spending some more time with Allen and his cast tomorrow, so make sure you stop by.Woody Allen is no stranger to Cannes. Café Society is the 14th of his films to screen at the festival and the third one to launch it.

A nostalgic throwback to the glamorous nightclubs and pool parties of 1930s New York and Hollywood, it's a wistful story of thwarted romance that Allen himself narrates.

Its hero is Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), a naïve rube from the Bronx who travels to Los Angeles in the hope of getting a job from his hotshot agent uncle (Steve Carell).

He quickly falls in love with his uncle's secretary (Kristen Stewart), only to discover she has a boyfriend to whom she is devoted.

Can Bobby win her heart? Or will 'Vonnie' - short for Veronica - choose to stay with her lover, even it means breaking up his marriage?

It's one of several moral dilemmas Allen toys with in a film which has a central theme of how the choices we make shape, steer and, in some cases, cut short our lives.

Sumptuously photographed by Vittorio Storaro, Café Society is a gentle, meandering tale that revels in Manhattan's after-hours world of cocktails and jazz bars.Curiously, though, it also contains isolated scenes of mob-related violence that one would more readily associate with Martin Scorsese than its 80-year-old director.

I suspect the Cannes critics will be perplexed by a picture that, like a lot of Allen's recent work, falls somewhere between playful comedy and thoughtful drama.

But I'm sure they'll laugh as heartily as I did when one character remarks that one should "live every day as if it's your last - because some day, you'll be right".

Café Society will open the Cannes Film Festival later and is out in the UK in September.