Will Cannes adapt to age of #MeToo?
The experience of watching a few dozen or more films inside two weeks at the Cannes Film Festival can be jarring, exhilarating and exhausting — even for those who live and breathe cinema.
Jessica Chastain, an actress and regular attendee of the French Riviera festival, last year reflected on her time spent on the Cannes jury shortly after they selected Ruben Ostlund’s The Square as the Palme d’Or winner. She was both overwhelmed and disappointed.
“This is the first time I’ve watched 20 films in 10 days, and I love movies,” Chastain said. “The one thing I really took from this experience is how the world views women, from the female characters that I saw represented. And it was quite disturbing to me, to be honest.”
On the cusp of the 71st Cannes, which begins Tuesday with the premiere of Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows, with Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, Chastain’s piercing criticism still hovers over a festival that finds itself, unlike it has in decades, in tumult.
This year’s selections, including three female directors among the 21 Palme contenders, have done little to quell pleas by Chastain and others for more female storytellers at the world’s most prestigious film festival. Questions of gender equality are especially pointed at Cannes, which for the last 20 years had been a seaside playground for Harvey Weinstein, long one of the festival’s most ubiquitous operators. Cannes remains perhaps the most supreme and heightened realm of moviedom, but its rarified stature has been increasingly challenged by both the era of #MeToo and the age of Netflix.
“There have been seismic, tectonic changes in the industry that are still unfolding,” says producer Simon Chinn, who will be premiering the Whitney Houston documentary Whitney — “a corrective to the tabloid story,” he says, and shopping a documentary on Weinstein titled Citizen Weinstein. ”This will be a very different Cannes without Weinstein.”
Festival director Thierry Fremaux, who called the Weinstein revelations an “earthquake” for Cannes, has promised this year heralds “a great renewal.” He has stocked the competition lineup with eight first timers. He has banned selfies from the red carpet, irritated by their interruption to the highly orchestrated, star-studded procession on the most famous red carpet next to the Oscars. He has, after a public scuffle, accepted the absence of Netflix films from the festival after being unable to secure theatrical releases for its entries. And he has brought Star Wars back to Cannes for the megawatt premiere of Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Cannes, a feverish pageant of celebrity and cinema, is trying to both rigorously guard tradition and adapt to fast-changing times. The festival this year even altered its sacred schedule to eliminate morning press screenings ahead of premieres — a strategic switch intended to blunt the effect of press-corps boos marring film premieres, a practice that had emerged as a kind of blood sport at Cannes.
Yet some say it’s not enough for Cannes to change its clocks. Critics says the festival has lagged in gender equality (only one female director, Jane Campion, has won the Palme; in 2015 a minor scandal erupted when women not wearing heels were denied entry to a premiere), and that Cannes is overly in the thrall of male auteurs.
This year’s jury is headed by Cate Blanchett, an outspoken member of the Time’s Up movement. Her jury of nine includes Ava DuVernay, Kristen Stewart, Lea Seydoux and Burundian singer Khadja Nin.