A COMBUSTIBLE CANNES
FESTIVAL IS SET TO UNFURL WITH FURIOSA, MEGALOPOLIS AND A #METOO RECKONING
It’s kind of optimal cinema, really. The moment that they said, ‘OK, we’re happy to show this film here,’ I jumped at it. — George Miller
The Cannes Film Festival rarely passes without cacophony but this year’s edition may be more raucous and uneasy than any in recent memory.
The 77th Cannes will unfurl against a backdrop of war, protest, potential strikes and quickening #Metoo upheaval in France, which for years largely resisted the movement.
Festival workers are threatening to strike. The Israel-hamas war, acutely felt in France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish and Arab communities, is sure to spark protests. Russia’s war in Ukraine remains on the minds of many. Add in the kinds of anxieties that can be expected to percolate at Cannes — the ever-uncertain future of cinema, the rise of artificial intelligence — and this year’s festival shouldn’t lack for drama.
Befitting such tumultuous times, the film lineup is full of intrigue, curiosity and question marks.
The Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, just days before his latest film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, is to debut in competition in Cannes, was sentenced to eight years in prison by the Islamic Revolutionary Court. The film remains on Cannes’ schedule.
Arguably the most feverishly awaited entry is Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed opus Megalopolis. Even the upcoming U.S. presidential election won’t be far off. Premièring in competition is Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, starring Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump. There will also be new films from Kevin Costner, Paolo Sorrentino, Sean Baker, Yorgos Lanthimos and Andrea Arnold. And for a potentially powder keg Cannes there’s also the firebomb of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. The film, a rolling apocalyptic dystopia, returns director George Miller to the festival he first became hooked on as a juror.
“I got addicted it to simply because it’s like film camp,” says Miller. “It’s kind of optimal cinema, really. The moment that they said, ‘OK, we’re happy to show this film here,’ I jumped at it.”
The Second Act is the official opener, a French comedy by Quentin Dupieux, starring Lea Seydoux, Louis Garrel and Vincent Lindon. But the spotlight at the start may fall on Judith Godreche. The French director and actor earlier this year said the filmmakers Benoit Jacquot and Jacques Doillon sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager, allegations that rocked French cinema. Jacquot and Doillon have denied the allegations.
Though much of the French film industry has previously been reluctant to embrace the #Metoo movement, Godreche has stoked a wider response. She’s spoken passionately about the need for changes at the Cesars, France’s equivalent of the Oscars, and before a French Senate commission.
In that same period, Godreche also made the short film Moi Aussi during a Paris gathering of hundreds who wrote her with their own stories of sexual abuse. It opens Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section.
“I hope that I’m heard in the sense that I’m not interested in being some sort of representation of someone who just wants to go after everyone in this industry,” Godreche said ahead of the
festival. “I’m just fighting for some sort of change. It is called a revolution.”
Cannes has often come under criticism for not inviting more female filmmakers into competition, but the festival is putting its full support behind Godreche while girding for the possibility of more #Metoo revelations during the festival.
Some of the filmmakers this year are already firmly lodged in Cannes lore. Paul Schrader was at the festival almost 50 years ago for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, which he wrote. After a famously divisive response, it won the Palme in 1976.
“It was a different place. It was much more collegial and lower key,” said Schrader. “I remember quite well sitting on the terrasse at the Carlton with Marty and Sergio
Leone and (Rainer Werner), Fassbender came by with his boyfriend and joined us. We were all talking and the sun was going down. I was thinking, ‘This is the greatest thing in the world.’”
For the first time since his 1988 drama Patty Hearst, Schrader is back in what he calls “the main show” — in competition for the Palme d’or — with Oh, Canada. The film, adapted from a Russell Banks novel, stars Richard Gere as a dying filmmaker who recounts his life story for a documentary. Jacob Elordi plays him in ’70s flashbacks.
Who ultimately goes home with the Palme will be decided by a jury led by Greta Gerwig, fresh off the mammoth success of Barbie. What tends to really define a Cannes, though, is emerging filmmakers. Among those likely to make an impression this year is Julien Colonna, the Corsican, Paris-based director and co-writer of The Kingdom. The film, an Un Certain Regard standout, is a brutal coming of age about a teenage girl (newcomer Ghjuvanna Benedetti), on the run with her father (Saveriu Santucci), a Corsican clan leader.
“We wanted to propose a kind of anti-mob film,” Colonna says, referencing the prevalence of Godfather-inspired gangster dramas. “As a viewer, I’m quite bored of this. I think we need to move to something else and propose a different prism.”
The Kingdom, Colonna’s debut feature film, arose out of his own anxieties around the birth of his child six years ago He shot most of the film in Corsica near his hometown.
“This is where I grew up,” says Colonna. “This is where I learned to swim. The shower where her kiss takes place is the shower where I kissed for the first time.”