The first rule of amfAR is you don’t talk about how you got to amfAR.

By that, I don’t mean how you got into the amfAR gala, i.e. how you landed a seat at the glitziest annual event of the Cannes Film Festival, which for my delightful table-mates in the back left corner of the room involved donating art or an electric vehicle for auction, knowing a wealthy media mogul who had extra invites, or paying 17,000 euros per plate. Once there, one could bask in a beautiful evening of free-flowing champagne; performances from Robbie Williams, Zara Larsson and Lizzo; the presence of Rami Malek, Eva Longoria, Heidi Klum, reality TV great Maura Higgins, and host Geena Davis, auctioning off Warhols and rare Marilyn Monroe photographs, and the chance to help raise millions of euros for AIDS research.

No, the dirty secret no one ever talks about is the actual transport to and from the gala itself, all the way out at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Rock on the tip of Antibes, a 30-minute drive from downtown Cannes. For those fortunate enough to have a car and driver, or to already be staying at one of the most exclusive hotels on the Mediterranean (or even better, on one of the mega yachts docked just offshore), it’s easy. For everyone else, including this freelance journalist without an expense account, the approach is more like a military-level obstacle course designed to test your cunning and will. 

This is when one begins to question why we cover this fabulous and excessive gala at all, at a time of global recession and war in Gaza and Iran. But as model Coco Rocha later tells me, while wearing a dress covered in white feathers, with a very tall white feathered hat, “I don’t think people realize how much money is created in this night… and I fantasize that some day we’ll walk in and someone will say, ‘We’ve found a cure for AIDS.’” Thursday night’s fundraising total was 17 million euros, or $20 million.

She continues: “So it may be confusing to people on social media why everyone’s so excessively dressed… but maybe I can put on a crazy hat and someone in my daughter’s Generation Alpha stops scrolling on TikTok and says, ‘What’s amfAR?’ and looks it up. That’s a win.” 

I begin my odyssey two and a half hours before dinner when, in dramatic Hollywood fashion, I missed the last ridiculously early press shuttle bus from Cannes and have to hop on a local train to Antibes, battling beachgoers and day trippers in my required black-tie dress code of gown and heels. Soon, I will learn that drivers on the taxi app Bolt (more prominently used in the South of France than Uber) take pre-paid ride requests more like starting points for negotiation than actual paid gigs. The first of three drivers will only take me part of the way because he’s just come back from where I’m going and the journey was too annoying to bear. Great sign. 

He drops me off at a police checkpoint that in prior years used to serve as the starting point for the world’s funniest 5k, as partygoers exasperated with traffic would flood to the streets and weave between bumpers, shedding feathers and sequins. Seconds after my driver’s taken off, the police inform me that walking to amfAR is now forbidden for “security reasons.” Perhaps intrepid folks were throwing on gowns and trying to blend in with the walking invitees? We should be toasting to their ambition! 

A new driver picks me up, but seconds after I hand him a car pass to get through the checkpoint that is right in front of us, he turns around and speeds off in the opposite direction. It feels less like a kidnapping attempt than a GPS misinterpretation, but over 20 minutes of Google Translate conversations, I grasp that he’s a Romanian immigrant who freaked out at all the police presence and was scared they’d take away his drivers’ license. He unceremoniously drops me on the side of the road and I’m left to find a third car, a kind French Uber driver who gets past the checkpoint only to hit standstill traffic only to panic because he has someone waiting for him to pick them up in the next beach town over. We endure the twenty minutes it takes to drive two blocks, only to hit the next traffic jam, which is absolutely every person at the gala waiting in line to get snapped on the red carpet. I jump in behind some staff and find a secret bypass route. Don Quixote, eat my dust! 

As we finally, FINALLY emerge outside on the grand grounds of the Hotel du Cap, it’s just gowns and bow ties all the way to the sea. The big-ticket auction items are on display outside and heavily guarded, like a Terry O’Neill photo portrait of Brigitte Bardot in 1971 that will 100,000 euros ($116,000), or a set of 10 Andy Warhol Marilyns that will get 2.8 million euros ($3.25 million) in the biggest sale of the night. 

Heidi Klum is there in a black gown with an impossibly corseted top, charming everyone and looking starkly different than at the Met gala just weeks earlier, when she covered herself in latex and spandex to become a marble statue and embody the “Fashion is Art” theme, winning our endless admiration for total commitment. I’d seen her out on the street during the Met searching for her car, presumably trying to get out of that thing. “I was just in there, melting!” says Klum, who explained the costume had been glued onto her and was just as much of a process to get into as out. Being in a corset is a marked improvement. “I can’t breathe for other reasons, but my skin can breathe.” 

Beside her is her husband, German musician Tom Kaulitz, and they explain that amfAR Cannes was their first date in 2018. She wore a white dress that she didn’t know was a wedding dress, but it must’ve been a sign because they got married a year later.

Also wandering the grounds is auctioneer Simon de Pury, checking out the wares. “I’m always a nervous wreck before every auction, despite the fact that I have been doing it for 100 years,” he says. “Each time it is as if I had never done it, because you have these nightmares when you think, ‘What if no one bids?’” 

Before every auction, he eats an apple, a superstition that dates back to an auction he did in a castle in Germany for the Thurn und Taxis family. They had bowls of apples everywhere, which he’d eat, and the auction was a total triumph, which he thought had to be because of the apples. 

He, too, recognized the excess of the gala in hard times, but pointed out that the people who attend these things aren’t getting less wealthy. “We are clearly, very, very privileged and lucky, and I think that even in times like these, we have even a greater responsibility to give back, to be generous, and to try and make a difference this way.’” 

The excess of the gala is all part of the equation. Get people a little lubricated and having a good time and they’ll spend more than they were intending to. As if on cue, a man comes up and jokingly tells de Pury, “You’re the man I dislike the most! I hate you!” Last year, he spent more than he wanted to on a piece of art, but he couldn’t help it. De Pury was looking at him from a stage and then before he knew it, his hand was raised. 

Inside the gigantic dinner tent, an army of waiters clomp back and forth as the auction items sell fast and furious: 700,000 euros ($811,917) for a Denza car made in collaboration with Chopard that also comes with a watch and luggage designed for the trunk; 650,000 euros ($696,900) for a pair of Chopard earrings featuring two big diamonds and 310 smaller ones. 

AmfAR’s new CEO, Kyle Clifford, makes a compelling case for why fundraising was so necessary; he’s the first openly HIV-positive person to run the nonprofit. “This is an organization whose research has helped to keep me alive for 40 years,” he says.

Rami Malek and director Ira Sachs, whose movie, The Man I Love about New York artists during the AIDS crisis, sit at a table in prime view of Lizzo, who’s a surprise guest and sings “Don’t Make Me Love U.” Malek is there with his twin brother, who has a stubble and braids, and they make a fun contrast, the clean-shaven movie star and his doppelgänger who just stepped off the set of a Harmonie Korine movie.

Plates of food swirl around as auction attendants stand near eager bidders with red lightsaber-looking things that they raise in the air whenever someone ups the ante. De Pury shouts things like, “all you will be left with is eternal regret!” and “all I can see are glow sticks and the darkness,” and chastises the men in the room for not spending their “pocket money.” 

Models come out for an annual fashion show curated by former French Vogue editor Corine Roitfeld. This time they’re all embodying musicians and movie stars, like Madonna and Sofia Loren. The man who buys the whole 19-piece collection for his wife won by jumping just “a measly little bit,” as de Pury puts it, from 200,000 to 210,000 euros. De Pury is much happier when a walk-on role on the last season of Emily in Paris goes for 375,000 euros ($435,500) and then series creator Darren Starr offers a second walk-on role to double the money — so happy, in fact, that he breaks the wooden gavel he’s been using for 20 years when slamming it on the stage. He’s happier still when someone buys one of only five Audemars Piguet watches designed by artist George Condo for 1.45 million euros ($1.68 million). 

The crowd goes crazy when British singer Robbie Williams tells them to get dancing “because I’m f—-ing incredible!” and performs four hits, ending with “Angels,” which he dedicates to his daughter. When he told her he’d be performing in a place called Cannes for a nonprofit that does very important work, he says from the stage, “She said, ‘Was no one else available?’” The evening closes out with a spirited and twerk-forward performance from Zara Larsson. 

As the guests file out to an afterparty overlooking the sea, I run into de Pury, who’s cradling the broken remains of his trusty gavel of 20 years. “She had a good run,” he tells me. It was the passion over that Emily in Paris bid that did it He shows me his bandaged finger and tells a tale of how he just kept the auction going while sucking his finger and trying to get the blood off his white suit. He’s beaming about the night’s haul, the adrenaline still coursing through him. There is more dancing, and much drunken eating of pizza. I will somehow find my way back to Cannes via a shuttle bus to a parking lot, one Bolt driver who accepts my ride and then tries to double the price when I get in the car, and another driver who is lovely and just tells me the whole drive, through Google Translate, that I’m beautiful and he wants to take me out for ice cream. 

I walk home thinking of de Pury’s gavel, broken but now in a new form, where it will likely spend her days on display on a mantle being adored. Not a bad way to spend a lifespan, or end a night. And it was all for a good cause.