National Post (National Edition)
CANNES FESTIVAL GROWS CRANKIER WITH AGE.
CANNES LOSES PATIENCE WITH DIGITAL WORLD, GROWS CRANKIER IN ITS OLD AGE
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 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 Bong Joon Ho’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 it could no longer screen films in competition. The streaming service responded by pulling out of the festival altogether. Result:AnewmoviefromPaul 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 American 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 theSilverLakebyDavidRobert Mitchell.
Just a few years ago, Cannes could be counted on to showcase four or five big American names each year (Woody Allen, Gus Van Sant and Soderbergh are all regulars), as well as screening one or two Pixar or popcorn pictures like Up, Indiana Jones or X-Men out of competition. A few years earlier and the Americans were hosting huge parties or delivering stunts, like the time Jerry Seinfeld zip-lined from the Carlton Hotel to the beach in a bee costume to promote Bee Movie.
One thing not changing at Cannes 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 festival will feature 17 male directors and three women — Nadine Labaki of Lebanon, France’s Eva Husson, and Italy’s Alice Rohrwacher. This after jury member Jessica Chastain chastised organizers last year for their poor showing.
“If you have female storytelling, you have more au- thentic female characters,” she said at the time, adding thatshefoundtheportrayal of women in many of the competition films “quite disturbing.”
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. In another oddity, the festival has not scheduled a press conference for the film, as it did when Episode II and III played here back in theday.
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 press 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 that the highest-profile films will be seen simultaneously by critics and celebrities.
“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.”
That sounds almost festive to this reviewer, but Cannes clearly thought otherwise. However, French critics, under the aegis of their guild, the Syndicat Français de la Critique de Cinema, fired back with a manifesto of their own.
“When will (critics) write their articles?” they demanded to know, and threatened that the change could lead “some journalists to renounce conducting interviews and do them before having seen the films,” or make publications “reduce their editorial coverage of the festival by sending fewer journalists and critics.
The Syndicat is not to be taken lightly. It is as old as the festival itself, and in 1962 founded the International Critics’ Week, a sidebar that runs in tandem with the official competition at Cannes and has showcased early work from such directors as Alejandro González Iñárritu, Tony Scott and this year’s incompetition director David Robert Mitchell.
Frémaux also took the opportunity to issue a “ban” on red-carpet selfies, although how that will be enforced remains to be seen. “You don’t come to be seen; you come to see films,” he said at an impromptu press conference on Monday to discuss the ban, and clearly forgetting Brigitte Bardot’s bikini-clad frolic on the beach in 1953, which made her a star.
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 de Festival is an exciting prospect. If I catch it happening, I’ll tweet about it.
Cannes is a sort of gladiators’ arena, and that’s the fun part of it. When you accept to come here to open the festival, you know you are going to be criticized. Ihaveno problem with the fact that I expose myself and the movie, and it’s normal that I can disagree with the way some people feel.
— Olivier Dahan, filmmaker