CANNES OPENER
No selfies, no tweeting, no streaming at this year’s film festival
CANNES Seventy-one may not seem like a milestone birthday, but the Cannes Film Festival has long marched to the beat of its own drum, and has decided its 71st is a time to take stock. And like more than a few septuagenarians, it has little patience with the digital world. Cannes, running May 8-19, is at a crossroads of its own making.
The biggest news this year is who’s not in the south of France. Last year, Netflix made waves (and enemies) when it premièred Joonho Bong ’s Okja and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories in competition for the Palme d’Or (neither won anything unless you count an acting prize for the dog in Meyerowitz), then refused to show them again on French cinema screens before releasing them on its streaming platform.
Organizers seemed caught off guard by the flouting a rule Cannes has long taken for granted: Of course the movies it shows will play in cinemas. They’re movies.
When Netflix refused to change its ways this year, Cannes said Netflix could no longer screen films in competition. The streaming ser- vice responded by pulling out of the festival altogether. Result: A new movie from Paul Greengrass, an Orson Welles documentary from Morgan Neville, and a restored version of Welles’ unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind will skip the Croisette.
Those no-shows highlight a dearth of U.S. films this year at a festival that basically discovered Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson. The only two U.S. films in competition are Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, and Under the Silver Lake by David Robert Mitchell.
Just a few years ago, Cannes could be counted on to showcase four or five big U.S. names each year (Woody Allen, Gus Van Sant and Soderbergh are all regulars), as well as screening one or two Pixar or popcorn pictures such as Up, Indiana Jones or X-Men out of competition.
One thing not changing this year is the number of female directors in competition, but here the festival risks moving backwards by staying still. With a record four women filmmakers out of 21 in competition in 2011, there’s never been a year when they couldn’t conceivably share a taxi into town from the airport.
This year will feature 17 male directors and three women. This after jury member Jessica Chastain chastised organizers last year for their poor showing.
The biggest show in town for Cannes 71 is Disney’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, but even that has an inauspicious screening slot during the second week of the 12-day event, and five days after its Los Angeles world première on May 10.
But Cannes’ biggest break with the past has been a revamping of its press-screening schedule. For years, critics have been able to see a movie at 8:30 in the morning and then attend a news conference for said film, which would be shown again in the black-tie, red-carpet gala “première” later that night.
But social media being what it is, the evening screening would often commence under a pall of negative tweets and online reviews. Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees, Sean Penn’s The Last Face and Canadians Atom Egoyan (Captives) and Xavier Dolan (It’s Only the End of the World) have all suffered in an era when thumbs-down means those thumbs are tweeting vicious remarks just minutes after the press screening ends.
And so longtime festival director Thierry Frémaux has changed things so critics and celebrities will see the highest-profile films simultaneously.
“The schedule has not changed for decades,” the festival said in an unsigned email sent to critics a few days before the event began. “The underlying logic was based on usages blown to bits by the massive incursion of digital technologies in our professional and personal lives over the past 15 or so years. Basically, as soon as a film is screened, the social networks turn it into confetti-like strips of rumours.”
Cannes also issued a “ban” on red-carpet selfies, although how that will be enforced remains to be seen.
The idea of burly security guards wrestling phones from the hands of modern Hollywood starlets trying to snap their images while climbing the steps of the Palais des Festivals is an exciting prospect. If I catch it happening, I’ll tweet about it.