Robbie Collin:
Amid a legal battle and a Netflix exodus, there’s plenty left on the festival’s line-up, says Robbie Collin
Never mind Avengers: Infinity War. The biggest cinematic cliffhanger of the season is playing out on a Boulevard de la Croisette near you. The Cannes Film Festival is being taken to court by the prolific Portuguese producer Paulo Branco, who wants to have Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote struck from its closing night slot. Branco is already embroiled in a legal feud with Gilliam over the rights to his passion project of 19 years, which was previously beset by floods, disease, vanishing actors and a shrivelling budget.
Last week, the festival shot back in a catty press release that they “calmly await” the results of a legal hearing on Wednesday that will determine whether or not the screening can go ahead. That insouciance is Cannes to the core, though there’s something very Gilliam-esque about a festival only finding out if it will be able to close the day before it opens.
Besides, the 2018 edition of Cannes has plus gros poissons à frire, particularly since some of the biggest fish in the business won’t be present. Britain’s two-time Palme d’or winner Mike Leigh, Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino, French provocateur Claire Denis, and Italian master Paolo Sorrentino are all unexpectedly absent.
Then there was the great Netflix exodus, in which the streaming service withdrew its entire slate from the programme – including the latest from Paul Greengrass and Alfonso Cuarón, and (this really stings) the once lost but now painstakingly reconstructed final film from Orson Welles – when their ongoing tiff with the festival couldn’t be resolved.
So what’s left? Well, Cannes has assembled a line-up of new names and rising stars from all over the place, with the expected mix of blockbusting and button-pushing saved for elsewhere in the programme. Things ignite on Tuesday with a bit of both: Everybody Knows, a psychological thriller starring real-life couple Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, and directed by Iran’s Asghar Farhadi, the setter of such prickly moral puzzles as A Separation and The Past.
While a Cruz-bardem red carpet sounds like a glitzy pinnacle of Euro-art-house glamour, for sheer media noise it will be drowned out by Solo: A Star Wars Story, the troubled fourth instalment in the franchise’s post-george Lucas period. After a change of directors and extensive reshoots – according to one account, 80 per cent of the film had to be redone from scratch – there will be a high premium on early reactions to the film, which delves into the origins of that galaxy far, far away’s stuck-up, halfwitted, scruffy-looking pilot-for-hire.
At the other end of the familyfriendly scale, though no less hotly awaited, is The House that Jack Built, a reportedly unsparing Matt Dillon/ Uma Thurman serial killer drama, which marks the Cannes return of Lars von Trier. You’ll recall the Danish director’s expulsion from the festival in 2011 when he jokingly professed Nazi sympathies at a press call. Seven years on, this is his comeback.
The name David Lynch is already being approvingly murmured in connection with Under The Silver Lake, a noir-tinged mystery from David Robert Mitchell (It Follows), in which Andrew Garfield stars as a Los Angeles hipster whose pretty young neighbour disappears overnight.
Mitchell’s film is one of only two English-language productions in competition: the other is Spike Lee’s Blackkklansman, which chronicles the absurd-but-true infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan by an African-american detective in the 1970s.
Alas, there’s no British contender to cheer for. Mike Leigh’s historical epic Peterloo was expected to be there, but will almost certainly now crop up at Venice. Out of competition, there are three UK productions: Don Quixote (if Gilliam makes it) along with two documentaries, Kevin Macdonald’s Whitney, made with input from the Houston clan, which promises new revelations from the troubled singer’s personal life, and The Eyes of Orson Welles, a cine-portrait from Mark Cousins that delves into the great director’s personal papers. Cannes’s changing status might have lost them the maestro’s own swan song, but where there’s a Welles, there’s a way.
The Cannes Film Festival runs from today until Saturday May 19. For full coverage, please visit telegraph.co.uk/ cannes-film-festival