Comme ci comme ça
Mixed reactions the norm at this year’s Cannes fest
CANNES — The 70th Cannes Film Festival has moved into its final weekend 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 died also. Heightened security was highlighted when a suspicious package led to the main festival building being briefly evacuated. Then the terrorist attack in Manchester caused organizers to cancel out of respect what was to have been a celebratory fireworks display.
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 puts 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 The
Square by Swedish director Ruben Östlund ( Force Majeure), 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 second-day 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 preteens 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.
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 genera-
tions of performers in Nicole Kidman (aged 49), Kirsten Dunst (35) and Elle Fanning (19), as well as several younger actors, down to 13-yearold 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.
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 Hollywood blockbusters, and the only “palmes” will be those lining the beachfront Croisette.