THE anticipation was palpable as French paparazzi and gawkers crowded the red carpet outside the beachfront Grand Hôtel and awaited the arrival of the film festival stars.
With the early evening sun slanting across the sea, teenage autograph hounds squeezed their way to the velvet ropes while a 20-something woman in a T-shirt depicting Woody Allen stood on her tiptoes to see over the rows of heads. Nearby, an elderly man in a pink Lacoste shirt gripped a baguette with such anxious force that he seemed certain to crush it.
For a flashbulb instant, the scene could easily have been mistaken for the Cannes International Film Festival, that two-week, all-eyes-on-it gala held each spring in the resort city in southern France.
But this was the tiny village of Cabourg — located along a stretch of France’s northern coast known as the Côte Fleurie — and the event was the weekend-long Cabourg Romantic Film Festival. Cannes was on the opposite side of the country both geographically and spiritually. Spend a week traveling by car or local bus among the seaside villages that dot the 25 miles of craggy, wind-swept coast — Cabourg, Houlgate, Villiers-Sur-Mer, Deauville, Trouville, Cricqueboeuf and Honfleur — and the differences soon become obvious.
Sure, the Côte Fleurie serves up film festivals (the Deauville American Film Festival in September is second only to Cannes), expansive beaches (particularly the golden sands of Deauville and Trouville), seafood-laden local cuisine (with excellent new spots in the port of Honfleur), artistic history (Monet and other Impressionists painted here), celebrity residences (the Rothschilds, Gérard Depardieu and Yves Saint Laurent are among current and former homeowners) and all-night casinos (place your bets in Cabourg and Deauville).
But unlike its southern sibling, it does so without fanfare. Mega-yachts with helipads are rare, the Lamborghini-per-capita ratio wows almost nobody, and local Calvados apple liqueur (made in the region’s famous orchards) finds far more favor than Cristal Champagne.
Better still, at only two hours from Paris by car or train, the Côte Fleurie doesn’t require a private jet to reach it. If the Côte d’Azur finds its American counterpart in glammy spots like Miami or Malibu, the Côte Fleurie is more the overseas analogue of Newport or Martha’s Vineyard.
“Here, the people don’t come to be seen,” said Sylvain Choblet, general manager of Les Manoirs de Tourgéville, a new luxury hotel close to Deauville. Owned by the Groupe Floirat, known for Côte d’Azur hot spots like the Hôtel Byblos in St.-Tropez, the new forest hideaway of half-timbered pavilions is the group’s first foray into northern France and its most unostentatious project. “It’s much more intimate,” Mr. Choblet said. “People come here to be tranquil, to rest, to rejuvenate.”
The area’s cultural heart is Honfleur, “a ravishing port full of masts and sails, crowned with green hills and surrounded by narrow houses,” as Victor Hugo put it in the 19th century. Like other Côte Fleurie towns, Honfleur was a fishing village that began to flourish as a cosmopolitan getaway with the arrival of the railroad link to Paris in the 1860s.
On a Sunday afternoon in June, throngs of French travelers filled the town’s spider web of cobbled streets, ambling past town houses — some in red brick, some in gray stone, some with shingle facades — that sported copper lanterns or wooden signs advertising candle and soap stores. Seagulls circled overhead, their cries mingling with the sound of church bells.
Almost every lane in Honfleur seems to turn up some romantic hideaway or hole-in-the-wall. Slip down the Rue des Capucins and you discover La Maison de Lucie, a rustic-chic boutique hotel whose protected garden courtyard and large drawing-room fireplace lend themselves perfectly to cocooning.
At Place Hamelin, two excellent restaurants have sprouted. Under the wooden beams of Entre Terre et Mer, fish are prepared with occasional Asian ingredients. Opposite, in the minimalist white dining room of Sa.Qua.Na, dishes also have an Eastern flair, courtesy of Alexandre Bourdas, a French chef who used to live in Japan. The restaurant made a splash earlier this year when it earned its second Michelin star.
Even more abundant are galleries and exhibition spaces — no surprise in a town that begs to be painted. Many French artists have done just that. Georges Seurat, the founder of Neo-Impressionism, captured the old harbor, which today is surrounded by tiny bars and expansive terrace cafes that serve Belgian beers and croque-monsieurs to linen-clad French tourists. Raoul Dufy pointed his easel toward the centuries-old Église Ste.-Catherine, whose exterior of wooden boards and shingles feels plucked from Cape Cod and now adorns postcards that fill souvenir shops.
On this afternoon, art aficionados drifted among the airy rooms of the Musée Eugène Boudin to gaze at coastal scenes of Honfleur by Impressionist and pre-Impressionist masters — Claude Monet, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Édouard Villard, Johan Barthold Jongkind — whose works comprise a gala exhibition called “Honfleur: Entre Tradition et Modernité, 1820-1900.” Running through Sept. 6, the 225-work exhibition is one of the many cultural events in northern France that are part of “Impressionist Normandy,” a yearlong festival that celebrates the region’s role in unmooring painting from the strict rules and realistic storytelling styles of the past.
By SETH SHERWOOD
The old port at Honfleur.
