The most commonly heard question during the opening days of the Cannes film festival is: “What are you seeing right now?”, because everybody’s excited and no one wants to miss out. In the event’s closing stage it’s overtaken by others. How long does this last? What time does it end? As the clock ticks towards midnight, the invited guests start to flag. The heart remains willing but the flesh is now weak.
If the ticket holders outside the Palais have begun to move in the manner of tired pensioners, they find kindred spirits of sorts in many of the event’s biggest names. Octogenarians dominated the red carpet this year, from Harrison Ford to Martin Scorsese, Marco Bellocchio to Ken Loach, while the average age of Ruben Östlund’s jury is nearly 20 years younger than that of the directors at work in the main competition. Cannes, at its summit, has become a country for old men.
Is this a problem? It certainly needs looking at. One issue with Cannes is that it is so steeped in cinema history, so much a shrine to established giants, that it’s often slow to update its files and point to the future as well as celebrating the past. But for the time being at least, the programme remains sturdy. Close Your Eyes, by 82-year-old Victor Erice, is a sweet drama about loss, full of dusty film canisters and mothballed village cinemas. Perfect Days by Wim Wenders – a comparative stripling at 77 –features a lonesome, ageing samurai (officially a cleaner of Tokyo’s public toilets) who slots antique cassettes into the tape deck of his van. Both films, no doubt, are salutes to a dying old world. Both, though, are heartfelt and wise and retain their sense of wonder.
Ahead of the screening of Bellocchio’s Kidnapped, I’m transfixed by the sight of two elderly Italian gentlemen leaning on their sticks right at the front of the queue. They’re champing at the bit; they can barely wait to get in. Who cares that the picture itself – a saga set in the 1850s tackling papal crimes – turns out to be heavy and sombre and altogether unwieldy? The men scamper for the doors like a pair of teenagers. In the cinema, perhaps, we all become kids again.
In any case, I preferred Erice and Wenders’s films to some of the vacuum-packed work produced by the generation behind. Todd Haynes’s May December is a tasty, teasing trifle kitted out in the guise of an afternoon soap, which casts Julianne Moore as a scandal-struck southern belle and Natalie Portman as the Hollywood star sent to play her. Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City spins the tale of “brainiac” students at a 1950s stargazer convention and arranges its oddball ensemble against a salmon-pink desert. Jessica Hausner’s Club Zero, meanwhile, is a glacial Pied Piper tale in which Mia Wasikowska’s anti-health guru puts her impressionable young disciples on a starvation diet. None of these movies is bad, exactly (and I liked Club Zero more than others did), but they’re so sealed and composed that one longs to crack open a window to let in some fresh air.
It’s one thing to see all of Cannes’s major titles; it’s another to do them justice on the page when you have. This is my cue to make like a rapid-fire race announcer, reeling off the names of the runners so as not to snub Justine Triet’s excellent Anatomy of a Fall, a labyrinthine courtroom thriller, and Aki Kaurismaki’s droll and gently moving zero-hours romance Fallen Leaves. Lagging near the back of the field we have Nanni Moretti’s A Brighter Tomorrow – an inconsequential film about film-making, god help us – alongside Karim Aïnouz’s Tudor thriller Firebrand, spotlighting the toxic marriage of Henry VIII (Jude Law) and Catherine Parr (Alicia Vikander), which is perfectly involving until it loses its head with a crowning coup de grace that manages to be at once cynical and plain silly.
Gulping for breath, let’s also throw in a mention of Tran Anh Hung’s handsome, bloated The Pot-au-Feu, a high-flown love story told through the medium of fine cuisine, featuring Benoît Magimel as “the Napoleon of gastronomy” and Juliette Binoche as his sickly backstage elf. Weaving through the kitchen, Tran ogles turbot, ortolans and quenelle as though the servings are co-stars, which quite likely they are. “The truffled turkey has arrived,” exclaims one greedy gourmand. That’s being unnecessarily harsh, but I did half take his point.
Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer is a more peppery affair – a neat gender-flip on a hoary French staple in which Léa Drucker’s middle-aged lawyer receives a revivifying sexual boost from her slouching teenage stepson. Naturally, this ends rather badly, and Breillat ably shows how bourgeois discontent lays the ground for a slow-rolling domestic disaster. Alongside its other fine qualities, Last Summer also provides one of the event’s great needle drops as Sonic Youth’s Dirty Boots plays accompaniment to a twilit country drive.
Overall, the 2023 vintage has ensured a strong competition, which suggests that whatever Cannes’s headaches, we’re not in crisis mode yet. For all that, there’s only one contender I’d hail as a stone-cold masterpiece. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, loosely adapted from the Martin Amis novel, played near the end of the first week, on the very day of the author’s death. It’s a tale of a happy German family who live next door to Auschwitz, placidly indifferent to the industrialised murder over the garden wall. By averting his gaze – but crucially never his interest – Glazer gives us a beautiful-looking film about the ugliest side of humanity, framed like a set of bucolic Carl Larsson illustrations, as Mica Levi’s score scratches at the margins like a horrible insect choir. The Zone of Interest just floored me. It’s a towering, terrifying work of art.
The biggest scrum takes place before the screening of Martin Scorsese’s mighty, Oklahoma-set Killers of the Flower Moon. The ticket holders are raging. Everybody hates everybody. Then the lights go down and the guests relax and applaud and start laughing as one. Jury president Östlund says the communal nature of cinema is actually its unique selling point. He compares its social value to that of a cherished British pub.
As luck would have it, a pub (once popular, now failing) is the setting for Ken Loach’s The Old Oak, the film that pulled down the shade on this year’s festival. The guests drag their weary bones up the stairs. Inside, they’re apprised of the state of County Durham, where terrace houses sell for £8,000 at auction, and tensions are rising between the locals and refugees. Earthy and nourishing in the tried-and-tested Loach vein, it’s a drama that pits the have-nots against the have-nothings; an imperfect film that made for a rousing sendoff. The 86-year-old film-maker claims it’s the last feature he’ll make. He’s said that before; chances are this time it’s true. So last orders, drink up. It’s always later than we think.
Xan Brooks’s best and the rest of Cannes week two
Best films
The Zone of Interest stands alone, but I also loved Martin Scorsese’s luxuriously old-school, richly textured Killers of the Flower Moon and Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents – a picaresque heist movie that steers a wild, jolting course.
Best performances
Sandra Hüller’s bisexual author is the very embodiment of Anatomy of a Fall’s locked-box mystery: a woman suspected of murdering her husband, who toys with our affections and keeps us guessing until the end. And Koji Yakusho’s turn as a soulful cleaner in Perfect Days feels like one for the ages. He looks like a professor and holds himself like a priest. He comes to wash off all our sins and make the world (or at least Tokyo) bright and new.
Best documentary
Cannes typically keeps an arm’s length from feature documentaries. This year we had two (Youth (Spring); Four Daughters) in the main competition, plus plenty of others elsewhere. One highlight was Mona Achache’s Little Girl Blue, a mesmerising docudrama inquiry, with Marion Cotillard brought in to recreate the director’s dead mum.
Best protest
The spirit of May 68 sputtered when Cannes prohibited public demonstrations. Happily, this didn’t deter fitness instructor Ilona Chernobai, who doused herself in fake blood at a midnight screening to protest against the war in Ukraine. She’s now banned from the festival. “It was worth it,” she said.
Best parties
Print isn’t dead; it’s partying like it’s 1999, as the traditional Vanity Fair cliff-top beanfeast folded Robert De Niro in with Alexa Chung and Jeff Bezos. Elsewhere, Harrison Ford showed up for the soiree hosted by A Rabbit’s Foot – a magazine I didn’t even know existed until they didn’t invite me along.
Best dog
It’s a crowded field for the annual Palme Dog award, thanks to pivotal canine roles in the Kaurismaki, Loach and Triet productions. My own favourite was Kali, the faithful black mongrel from Erice’s Close Your Eyes.
Technicolor yawns
It’s alarming to note that Triangle of Sadness’s notorious 15-minute vomiting scene has kickstarted a trend. They were puking in the nightclub (How to Have Sex), the bedroom (Club Zero) and – most horribly – in the office stairwell (The Zone of Interest). Hopefully by 2024 the bug will have run its course.
