Art isn’t maths, on that we can all agree: there’s no scientific way to quantify its ambitions or its success. Yet in film, in particular, we never stop finding ways to organise it by numbers. People pore over Rotten Tomatoes scores, box office figures and Oscar tallies, citing records and precedents as neat bars of achievement. Such considerations might be deemed crass at the august Cannes Film Festival, an institution that prides itself on an art-for-art’s-sake stance – while, of course, housing a heaving international market and a celebrity-swarmed red carpet.
But Cannes attendees can’t resist finding different, festival-specific metrics by which to measure even the most esoteric works. Every day, people pick up the daily edition of the UK trade publication Screen International and flip to the back page, where the “Screen grid” monitors how the films selected in that year’s competition are faring with its panel of film critics by collating their star ratings: currently, the Finnish veteran Aki Kaurismäki’s charmer Fallen Leaves is tops with a 3.2 average, a fraction of a point ahead of new films by Todd Haynes and Justine Triet. (It seems unlikely that any title this year will match the 3.8 record set five years ago by Lee Chang-dong’s Burning.)
