A few thoughts on the latest edition of the most important festival of the year: from the general selection to the controversies, and to the overall landscape of contemporary cinema.

Whenever I think of the ending of the Cannes Film Festival, the image that comes to my mind is that of the cleaning staff who, night after night, is tasked with vacuuming the 24 steps (corresponding to 24 frames per second) which lead up to the entrance of the Grand Theatre Lumiere within in the gargantuan Palais de Festivals. It’s an image that – at least, as far as I’m concerned – encapsulates the obscenity of this show of forces, the hidden cost of it all, particularly the human one: the army of workers holding who is maintaining the functionality of a chaotic gathering that is meant for more than just the happy few who climb the stairs under the light of flashing cameras, but also an entire anthill made up of tens of thousands of participants, most of them on the run, enrolled in an invisible race (thanks to the online ticketing system, itself an enormous source of chaos) to find a place for themselves among the thousands of seats within the enormous, but nonetheless all-too-small theatre of the Croazette.

All the countless stewards who smile at you and say “Bonne jour / soirée”, “Allez-y madame / monsieur”, “Voila, merci beaucoup!”, “Je vous en prie” or “Bonne seance!”, scattered around all the entrances, handling this entire human surge – and shout-out to the gentleman is the perfect look-alike of Michael Haneke who checked tickets at the Debussy hall, you’re amazing! –, joined by the rebels on the sidelines (see the disruption at the screening of the new Almodovar, Strange Way of Life). I can find no other way to write about Cannes than to start off with them, the unsung heroes, without whom the whole thing would collapse onto itself, without thanking them – here’s looking at you.

Cannes, Cannes – it’s a difficult task to put into words an edition that promised so much and only delivered partially, but then again, when it did… One presided by a jury that generated many great anxieties about the final line-up of awards (including yours truly), with a president in the figure of cynical double Palme d’Or winner Ruben Östlund. And so, one of the big surprises is that the final list of winners – and no ex-aequo awards! – is looking very good, and is broadly aligned with the year’s critical darlings.

Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, the third female-directed Palme d’Or in history; Jonathan Glazer’s shattering The Zone of Interest; and, last but not least, Finnish veteran Aki Kaurismäki’s superb Fallen Leaves – the top three favorites of the press also won the festival’s the three top prizes, along with actors Merve Dizdar (in a tour de force as a teacher with a background in political activism in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses) and Koji Yakusho (the quiet, mild-mannered janitor in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days). I can’t help but notice that, in a year when many filmmakers with one or more Palme d’Ors under their belts – Wenders, Kore-eda, Ceylan, Moretti, Loach – were in competition, Östlund left no room for any of them to match his score (or surpass it, in the case of the latter).

But it’s not Cannes without a bit of controversy – the biggest, at the moment, is unfolding in the right-wing French press, which is branding Justine Triet’s speech as “ungrateful“, while the French Minister of Culture described it as “flabbergastering” and “unfair”; whereas, in my eyes, the very fact that so much of the prestige political class has had its feathers ruffled by her statements proves not only that she touched on neuralgic subjects, but also that – in the absence of coherent, applied arguments to contradict her – the filmmaker was fully right.

The second biggest controversy is the one surrounding the selection of Cerrar Los Ojos in the idiosyncratic Cannes Premiere section (where Lisandro Alonso’s newest offering, Eureka, was also “thrown into”). Though the film doesn’t reach the heights of the work that earned him a place within the modern canon of cinema, the first film by the legendary Victor Erice in over three decades (!) is a glaring absence (in a competition packed with unsuccessful or uninteresting films helmed by other mammoths – Marco Bellochio, Nani Moretti, Ken Loach, Catherine Breillat). The trigger of this scandal was an open letter published in El País shortly after the world premiere, where Erice was conspicuously absent – namely, delegate-general Thierry Frémaux had (allegedly) simply ignored Erice’s appeals for confirmation regarding the film’s selection in the competition since the director had also received offers from the Quinzaine, Locarno, and Venice. Obviously enough, the festival provided a non-answer – they were probably too caught up in putting out the flames of the incident where Frémaux found himself in a confrontation with a cop after riding an electric bike on the sidewalk. Or with the controversy sparked by the rest of the films featured in the competition.

Let’s start at the beginning (chronologically) – namely, with the selection of Maïwenn’s Jeanne du Barry as the opening film: a signal that most critics took as a tacit endorsement, on the part of the festival, of the anti-Me Too camp (after all, the French industry has had big problems in this regard from the very beginning – summed up splendidly by actress Adele Haenel in a recent editorial). Surely enough, through Frémaux’s voice as a spokesperson, it declares itself unbiased – but it’s hard not to see the decision as a small referendum of sorts, given that the lead male performance is that of Johnny Depp, who, in the past year, has become the standard-bearer of the backlash against the industry’s movement for awareness against abuse. (And he wasn’t even the only member of the Depp family present at Cannes who was involved in an inflammatory production: see Rolling Stone’s investigation of the production of Sam Levinson’s new series starring Lily-Rose Depp, The Idol.)

Nor was the rest of the Official Competition selection afraid – at least from a thematic perspective – to court closely related uncomfortable topics. See Last Summer, the return of veteran Catherine Breillat after a decade-long hiatus, in which the plot is built around the illicit relationship between a lawyer and her 17-year-old stepson – or New Queer Cinema lodestar Todd Haynes’ May December. The film’s premise starts off with the relationship of Joe and Gracie, which is seemingly ordinary at the beginning of the plot, only for viewers to discover that it began twenty years prior when the man was just a pre-adolescent. Of course, unlike Breillat’s somber offering, Haynes treats the situation with a great deal of humor and dramatic flair: the couple is to be the subject of a docu-drama, and an actress (played by Natalie Portman) visits them to observe and document their lives, an occasion for meta-cinematic interweavings; a strategy which succeeds in putting the scandalous nature of the case into perspective. Last but not least, in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, we take a close look at the life of a provincial teacher who is appallingly mediocre and arrogant (Deniz Celiloğlu, in a wonderfully complex performance). He gets dangerously close to one of his fifth-grade students, who complains about this to the school’s principal – but, at the end of the day, it’s a red herring: not much more will come out of this situation, but do we get closer and closer to the idiosyncrasies of this detestable man over the course of the film’s three-hour-long run.

And, of course, as with any year, there were the spoiled apples: the terrible Black Flies, which reconfirms Frémaux’s inexplicable crush on Sean Penn (the director of the lowest-rated film in the history of the iconic Screen grid – 0.2), a film about paramedics that tries to emulate the aesthetic of Good Time (dir. Josh and Benny Safdie, 2017) on top of a chillingly racist script (in the film’s first half-hour, which is just about as much as I could last in the cinema, we get treated to the most horrific stereotypes about black, Latino, Arab and Asian communities). Or the Hallmark-style drama Firebrand (dir. Karim Ainouz), another absolutely unsolicited adaptation about one of Henry VIII’s wives (here, Katharine Parr, played by Alicia Vikander) with revisionist tendencies (viva pop-feminism!). Also in the realm of TV dramas, we find Marco Bellochio with Rapito, based on real events that took place during the fanatical and anti-Semitic rule of Pope Pius IX, or Ken Loach with The Old Oak, his migration drama that ends on a surreal note of optimism. A special mention – because it wasn’t in Competition – goes to Robert Rodriguez’s Hypnotic, which is already playing in cinemas these days: a film that I would simply describe as a fanfic inspired by Inception written by a sixth-grader.

But that doesn’t overshadow this edition’s great achievements – because, indeed, they did exist. From out of competition, beyond the epic Killers of the Flower Moon, Cerrar los Ojos or Eureka, there were the new short films by Pedro Costa (the exemplary As Filhas do Fogo, a three-screen installation piece inspired by a Ukrainian lullaby and the eruption of a volcano) and Jean-Luc Godard (a cinematic farewell letter as only JLG could have composed). And from the competition, the lush The Pot-au-Feu, Vietnamese filmmaker Tran Anh Hung’s return to the firmament, with Benoit Magimel and Juliette Binoche cooking up the most incredible gastronomic wonders over the course of the film’s two hours, an epicurean love letter; Wang Bing’s monumental documentary Youth (Spring) about the lives lived (stubbornly, yet lived) within the sweatshops of Chinese metropolis Zhili; and, last but not least, Fallen Leaves, Kaurismäki’s splendid reinterpretation of Hollywood classic An Affair to Remember, with its keen eye for both form (lighting, duration, color schemes) and content (the state of the worker in late capitalism, the ennui and alienation of modern society, the difficulty of love within such a world).

In an edition of long to very long films – many titles have tended towards, or even exceeded the 180-minute mark, often including within themselves, like matryoshkas, meta-cinematic elements, a tendency that I hope to expand upon in a future piece – the final signal of this edition of Cannes remains mixed. Sure, we have a young (that is, middle-aged) generation rising to the top of the industry, but it still very much carries the deadweight of many mediocre films made by yesterday’s stars (Bellochio, Loach, Moretti, etc.) whose sole trump card lies in the attached name tag attached. After an edition where the average age of the filmmakers in the competition was pretty high, it becomes clear that the Frémaux method – a man of his favorites, now far removed from the cheeky gestures (Shrek I & II!) of two decades ago – desperately needs an update, and it is his very own juries that are signaling this, year after year, with the composition of their palmares. I’m not trying to make an ageist argument, by any means – just see Wim Wenders’ improbable comeback with Perfect Days, his first good feature in over 25 years – but just to point out the obvious limits of the inane favoritism that has taken hold at the festival: otherwise, it will just repeat the same results, over and over again – up to 4-5 notable films in competition, 2-3 outside of it, and the rest of them will lie, forgotten, in some Wikipedia list or in a cupboard of unused booklets and promotional materials.

Main image: still from Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.