The new Cannes selection has been unveiled in one of the most tense and fraught geopolitical situations for years, giving even more of a frisson to the traditional rune-reading activity of scrutinising the festival’s list, and scrutinising cinema itself, for contemporary meaning. There is a very prominent Russian director in competition, Kirill Serebrennikov, with his film Limonov: The Ballad, starring Ben Whishaw as Russian opposition leader and poet Eduard Limonov, based on the novel by the veteran French author and public intellectual Emmanuel Carrère. Of course, the point is that Serebrennikov is a notable anti-government figure.
As far as the Gaza situation goes, there is an intriguing title in the Special Screenings sidebar: The Beauty of Gaza by French film-maker Yolande Zauberman, about a trans woman who travels from Gaza to Tel Aviv.
And as we approach the US election, Ali Abbasi’s film The Apprentice in competition mischievously tweaks the title of Donald Trump’s famous TV show for a drama about his early years in New York real estate, with Sebastian Stan as young Trump, learning the dark arts of political bullying and manipulation from the notorious prosecutor and McCarthy-intimate Roy Cohn – played by Jeremy Strong, a mouthwatering bit of casting.
As for the other traditional talking points, we have so far four women in the competition list: first-timer Agathe Riedinger with Wild Diamond, Mumbai film-maker Payal Kapadia with All We Imagine As Light, about a nurse whose life is thrown into disarray, Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror shocker The Substance featuring Margaret Qualley and the final appearance by the late Ray Liotta, and Andrea Arnold’s Bird, a UK-set drama of marginalised lives starring Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski. (The brilliant Zambian-Welsh film-maker Rungano Nyoni incidentally presents her new movie in the Un Certain Regard sidebar: On Becoming A Guinea Fowl.)
Against that it’s 15 men: a ratio that will continue to be found unsatisfactory in many quarters. Cannes has always countered this with the argument that its diversity resides in its internationalism, and the festival is furthermore still hanging tough against the streaming behemoths and still arguing for the big-screen experience, although as the Covid lockdown recedes into the collective memory somewhat, I sense this is less urgent.
But no doubt about it – Thierry Frémaux and the Cannes selectors take a pride in the huge Hollywood successes of last year’s competition titles, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (the Palme d’Or winner) and Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winner The Zone of Interest. And the director and star of last year’s colossal award winner Poor Things – Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone – are now back in competition with all-star anthology picture Kinds of Kindness.
All Cannes watchers will be (in a spirit of exasperation or loyalty) looking out for the festival’s silverback gorillas, the heavy hitters who come back year after year. None bigger, surely, than Francis Ford Coppola – a two-time Palme d’Or winner now going for the triple – with his colossal self-produced passion project Megalopolis, a futurist sci-fi extravaganza perhaps inspired by Lang. Frémaux has pointedly said it was an “honour” to include this film, perhaps a reproach to all the American distributors who have reportedly seen the film and made noises about how much they respect the great American film-maker but failed to put their money where their mouths are.
Added to that new films by Paolo Sorrentino, Paul Schrader, Sean Baker, Miguel Gomes, Jia Zhang-ke and Jacques Audiard, it’s another very seductive-looking package.
