Has Europe fallen out of love with the US? Has Cannes fallen out of love with Hollywood? Will the festival, like Nato, become a non-American institution? Either way, the annual announcement of the Cannes selection has revealed a list that skews away from Hollywood towards a renewed dominance of world-cinema auteurs and heavy hitters, including Pedro Almodovar, Cristian Mungiu and Asghar Farhadi. There’s certainly nothing to compare with last year’s Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible extravaganza, although there are directorial debuts out of competition for Andy Garcia (also starring) with his crime drama Diamond, and John Travolta directs Propeller One-Way Night Coach, expressing his love of aviation, based on his own novel. There are no British directors announced (as yet), although Polish auteur Paweł Pawlikowski, in competition with his Thomas Mann biopic Fatherland, could be cheekily claimed for the UK as he lived here for a long time.
Festival watchers and Cannesologists will be looking for the contemporary relevances and the now familiar talking points. The festival, under director Thierry Frémaux, has stuck to its refusal to admit streamer-only movies and won the argument by seeing its films do well at the Oscars. On the AI debate, perhaps Cannes is less purist. Steven Soderbergh’s documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview is based on John and Yoko’s final three-hour interview for RKO Radio shortly before Lennon’s murder, and for the visuals Soderbergh has reportedly used AI to reconstruct and reimagine the encounter. Some are intrigued, others uneasy.
There’s a distinct preponderance of male directors over female, although the selection has yet to be finalised. And for the great geopolitical issues, such as Russia’s war on Ukraine, all eyes will be on Minotaur by Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev – a film-maker once extravagantly adored by Vladimir Putin. Now their relationship has cooled and Zvyagintsev lives in exile in France. His movie is reportedly about a Russian businessman racked with domestic anguish. Larger political relevances can hardly be avoided.
The Middle East, Israel, Gaza, Lebanon and Iran do not, on the face of it, appear to be directly addressed this year; nothing like Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s drama Yes which features in the Director’s Fortnight last year. The Iranian director and fierce critic of the Iranian government Asghar Farhadi is in competition with his movie Parallel Tales, although it is set in France – Farhadi refuses to work in Iran now – and is inspired by Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog: Six – A Short Film About Love.Parallel Tales features Isabelle Huppert and Catherine Deneuve, without whose red carpet presence Cannes is unthinkable. (Deneuve is also in Marie Kreutzer’s Gentle Monster, along with Léa Seydoux.)
The traumatised history of wartime France looks to be it is a recurrent theme in competition: László Nemes’s Moulin is set in occupied France and features what is surely a mature performance from Lars Eidinger as Klaus Barbie. Emmanuel Marre’s Notre Salut is also set in Vichy France; Lukas Dhont’s Coward is about a Belgian soldier’s ordeal in the first world war trenches.
The theme of the bourgeois prosperous placidity and the violence and paranoia beneath – a perennial favourite at Cannes and the European arthouse circuit – looks set to resurface in Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, with Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a couple who go to live in a pleasant Norwegian town and experience something other than neighbourly friendship.
Out of competition is Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell, certain to bring the shock factor, and in the Un Certain Regard slot there is Jane Schoenbrun, one of the most interesting new indie US film-makers, with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a queer slasher romp. That could be Cannes’ hottest ticket.
