REAL LIFE IS BIGGER THAN FICTION
What the heck happened at Cannes this year?
The 70th Cannes Film Festival moved into its final weekend on Friday with a lacklustre competition lineup and no clear consensus as to which film might take the Palme d’Or. Many movies had their fans, but most were being viewed through the lens of not- the-director’s-best-work. “Mixed reactions,” in previous years a lazy way of saying that several people booed a film, was quickly turning into the unofficial motto of this anniversary event.
For those seeking trends, the dominant one seemed to be an off-screen malaise. Kim Ji-seok, co-founder of the Busan Film Festival, died of a heart attack while attending Cannes this year. Days later came news that Roger Moore had passed away. Heightened security was highlighted when a suspicious package led to the main festival building being briefly evacuated; then the terror attack in Manchester caused organizers to cancel what was to have been a celebratory fireworks display, out of respect. And there was Donald Trump, America’s first meme- president, casting a weirdly shaped shadow over the world.
Even so, cinema continued to drive conversations, and by late in the festival some themes could be discerned. Foremost was the ongoing refugee crisis in Somalia and indeed around the world. Nowhere was this more viscerally felt than by those lucky few who experienced Alejandro Iñárritu’s Carne Y Arena ( Flesh and Sand), a six- minute virtual- reality installation that put viewers in the midst of a police takedown of immigrants crossing the Mexico/U.S. border.
Actress and activist Vanessa Redgrave, who turned 80 in January, delivered her directorial debut at Cannes with Sea Sorrow, a very personal documentary about the European migrant crisis. But even among the fictional offerings, themes of displacement were common.
In Jupiter’s Moon, by Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó ( White God), a refugee is shot while crossing the border, and mysteriously gains the power to levitate at will. In Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s ( Force Majeure) The Square, notions of public behaviour and decorum take in the refugee underclass. And in Michael Haneke’s Happy End (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t have one), a well-off French family is forced to confront a group of immigrants they’d rather ignore.
Strong performances by child actors were another hallmark of the festival this year. It started early, with a secondday screening of Todd Haynes’ Wonderstruck. The cast includes Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams, but the story is carried squarely on the shoulders of Oakes Fegley and first-timer Millicent Simmonds as two pre-teens separated by 50 years but each seeking a truth about family that will bind them together. The film will open in North America in October.
Really though, not a day goes by without another stunning performance by a child actor. Another early competition film was Loveless from Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, about a couple who are separating when their 12- year- old son goes missing. In The Square, a young man almost steals the movie as a boy falsely accused of stealing a cellphone. In Bong Joon- ho’s Okja, 13- year- old Ahn Seo- hyun shares the screen with a computer-generated “super pig.”
The all-female (plus Colin Farrell) cast of Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, about an all- girls school that receives an unexpected male visitor during the Civil War, features three generations of performers in Nicole Kidman (aged 49), Kirsten Dunst (35) and Elle Fanning (19), as well as several younger actors, down to 13-year-old Addison Riecke. And clocking in at 24 but looking much younger is Barry Keoghan as the creepy central character in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
Of course, it wouldn’t be Cannes without films about artists. This year’s competition features two movies about sculptors — the fictional Harold Meyerowitz played by a heavily bearded Dustin Hoffman in Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, and the historical figure of Auguste Rodin, portrayed by a heavily bearded Vincent Lindon in Rodin, from director Jacques Doillon. Rodin focuses closely on the artist’s love affair with Camille Claudel, while Redoubtable from Michel Hazanavicius imagines the romance between John-Luc Godard and a much younger Anne Wiazemsky in the 1960s as a kind of early Woody Allen romp.
As to the game of handicapping the Palme d’Or, it’s a largely thankless task. A brand-new jury every year — this one is headed by Pedro Almodovar, and includes Will Smith, Jessica Chastain and Germany’s Maren Ade — means there’s little in the way of voter continuity as with the Oscars or Golden Globes. A critics’ poll conducted by the trade magazine Screen Daily had the Russian film Loveless in an early lead, but last year’s poll gave a record- high score of 3.8 out of 4 to Ade’s film Toni Erdmann, which ultimately went home empty- handed. Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, with a middling score of 2.4, won the festival’s top prize.
But part of the fun at Cannes is trying to parse the critics’ reactions. Do scattered boos from an audience signal a death knell, or just a few cranks? Will a film’s political message or artistic chops win over the crowd? Will a “difficult” film like A Gentle Creature, a two-hour-and-23- minute Kafkaesque nightmare from Sergei Loznitza, triumph over a pretty, poetic offering such as Radiance, Naomi Kawase’s lovely movie about a writer who meets a photographer who is losing his sight?
It will all be decided on Sunday, when the prizes are awarded in a televised ( in France) ceremony, after which Cannes will roll up the red carpets and get back to being an ordinary French seaside town. Next week, local cinemas will return to playing French comedies and American blockbusters, and the only “palmes” will be those lining the beachfront Croisette.