THE CURTAIN RISES ON CANNES
A-listers and films about musical greats set to shine at annual festival
Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, David Cronenberg, Kristen Stewart. Cannes Film Festival organizers have certainly rallied the troops for this year’s event, which began Tuesday. After last year’s COVID-19 instalment, the promise this year is a full blast of Cannes delirium with parties and paparazzi galore. What’s more, selectors unveiled a hat trick of high-profile features about deceased music legends: Elvis Presley, David Bowie and Jerry Lee Lewis. The latter two are documentaries, while Elvis is a jukebox biopic from Baz Luhrmann, who hasn’t made a film since 2013’s Cannes curtain-raiser The Great Gatsby.
First up is Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, a breezy-looking, 73-minute portrait of one of rock ’n’ roll’s original wild men, whose career nosedived when he married his 13-year-old cousin. Not since his own 1989 biopic, Great Balls of Fire!, has Lewis had a whole feature to call his own. Hours later, Moonage Daydream will be a hot ticket for Bowie fans. It’s not a standard digest, but a dynamic piece of visually wild, sonically electrifying cinema, with not a platitudinous talking head in sight.
In fact, the person doing most of the talking is Bowie himself. Director Brett Morgen had access to the singer’s complete personal archives from his estate, and has woven them into a sort of mosaic-cum-explainer. Previously unseen footage from shows gets pride of place.
Finally, there’s Elvis, which will be one of the last major premières to grace Cannes next Wednesday. It centres on a much-hyped, James Dean-like performance from Austin Butler as the titular performer. Early word says it’s all about the struggle for The King’s creative soul — the battles he fought to stay his own man, while manager Col Tom Parker (Hanks) tried to milk his talents for commercial gain. It’ll be in cinemas everywhere from late June.
Here’s a look at more highlights — and potential lowlights — on the French Riviera:
THE MOST UBIQUITOUS STAR
Last year, there was no escaping Léa Seydoux, who had four films here. In 2022, she’s has a mere two — Crimes of the Future and Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning — but has announced that she’ll shoot a remake of 1974 French film Emmanuelle, too. Other than Seydoux, no one will be everywhere quite as breathlessly as Tom Cruise, who’s returning to celebrate Top Gun: Maverick, 30 years after Far and Away closed the 1992 event. Everyone in town will be craning their necks to catch a glimpse of Cruise on the red carpet, before the festival serenades him with an official tribute.
THE PREMIUM RED CARPET MOMENT
Cruise climbing the Palais steps will make every front page, but there are plenty of other big-hitters coming. Luhrmann’s Elvis may star the relatively unknown Butler, but Hanks will pick up the slack. Cronenberg ’s latest has Viggo Mortensen, the inevitable Seydoux and 2018 juror Stewart out front. Plus, George Miller will return with his fantasy romance Three Thousand Years of Longing, pairing Idris Elba with Tilda Swinton.
THE SPLASHIEST PARTY
Last year, understandably, filmstar turnout was at an all-time low and celebrations around town much reduced. This year, you can expect Warner Bros. to bank on Elvis
and throw a no-expense-spared party complete with the appropriate set-list performed in the style of the King of Rock and Roll.
THE WEIRDEST FILM
The title goes to off-the-wall film Enys Men, the followup to 2019’s Bait from buzzy eclecticist Mark Jenkin. A woman on a deserted island has one job: to check in daily on a crop of rare flowers. Haunted by the ghosts of miners and lifeboatmen, her existence is a bizarre, looping ritual, crucially built around dropping a stone down a mine shaft. A lichen infestation spreads from the flowers to a large scar over her midriff. Oh, and there’s a malign standing stone which, without warning, shows up.
THE MOST CONSPICUOUS ABSENTEE
Netflix. Once upon a time, the streaming giant was welcomed to Cannes, with such in-house-funded films as Okja competing for the Palme d’Or. Since 2017, Netflix has been distributor non grata, because of the French government’s policy on 15-month theatrical windows before films can appear on subscription services. Negotiations recur annually, but with neither side budging, such hotly anticipated titles as Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, starring Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe, will be forced to wait for autumn exposure instead.
THE MOST LIKELY WALKOUT
This honour has been called already by Cronenberg, that master of itchy-feet controversy, who has declared that his competition entry Crimes of the Future is guaranteed to cause fuming offence. Depending on how closely the plot follows the director’s own shoestring 1970 feature of the same name — which ended with the kidnapping of a five-year-old girl by a pedophile ring, who attempt to induce her pregnancy with experimental drugs — a fair amount of apoplectic stomping to the exits looks certain.
THE LIKELIEST FLOP
Playing guess-the-turkey is a prize sport for Cannes habitués. It’s rarely a good sign for a studio to put on a black-tie gala for a film without showing the film to the press first, but that’s happening, perhaps worryingly, with Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing. Meanwhile, Lukas Dhont — who is in contention with his film Close — may be a whipping boy. His 2018 drama Girl, about a trans ballerina, was criticized for being voyeuristic and outdated.
THE MOST CLOAK-AND-DAGGER COMEBACK
Being hawked for sale on the industry side of the festival — far from the prying eyes of any press or juries — is a thriller called Peter Five Eight, starring Kevin Spacey. An industry pariah since 2017, when several allegations of sexual misconduct surfaced, Spacey has struggled to get much off the ground; his long-completed Gore Vidal biopic was shelved. In this, he’s playing Peter, “a charismatic man in a black sedan who shows up in a small mountainside community.”