The Cannes official selection list has been unveiled and it is a politicised lineup with a repeated thematic emphasis on the refugee crisis, designed to give the finger to the New Trump Order. The inclusion of Claude Lanzmann’s new film Napalm may be of interest to the White House press secretary Sean Spicer – horrified as he is about countries who use chemical weapons.
Cannes boasts heavy-hitters like Michael Haneke, whose Happy End instantly puts him in pole position to get a historic third Palme d’Or. There is the posthumous presentation of Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames, a compilation project of short tableau pieces; Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable, a movie about Jean-Luc Godard which the subject himself has already dismissed as a “stupid, stupid idea”; Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, starring Joaquin Phoenix and based on the Jonathan Ames novel; Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, a remake of Don Siegel’s 1971 civil war movie; and Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, based on Brian “Hugo” Selznick’s YA novel of the same name.
As for the question of diversity, there are 12 women directors in the official selection overall and three of those are in competition: Ramsay, Coppola and Naomi Kawase, the Japanese auteur who is a Cannes fixture. New wave legend Agnès Varda is back with her documentary Visages, Visages, co-directed with the French artist and photographer JR. Vanessa Redgrave is making her directing debut with Sea Sorrow, starring Ralph Fiennes and Emma Thompson, about European refugees fleeing war zones in the last century. Kristen Stewart has directed a short film, entitled Come Swim.
So the gender balance is not exactly a scandal, and this is a selection list that in other senses is internationalist and diverse in outlook in a way that Hollywood isn’t – but it is also clear that Cannes does not feel itself under pressure to reassess itself, or explicitly acknowledge the issue, in the way that the Academy awards has done. Yet over and above the traditional pageant of big names and silverback-gorilla auteurs, Cannes is, a little belatedly, embracing the new directions that have become settled features of other festivals. A double-episode prestige TV special has become a must-have nowadays, with The Night Manager at Berlin and The Young Pope at Venice. Now Cannes is unveiling David Lynch’s new Twin Peaks and the second series of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake.
Cannes is also making a bold new step into the world of virtual reality cinema, with a project from a big name. Alejandro González Iñárritu is presenting his virtual reality short film Flesh and Sand, about immigrants and refugees crossing the border from Mexico into the US. The film is shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki.
There will be great excitement at the inclusion of Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, starring Nicole Kidman (who will have to book her Airbnb for the complete Cannes run, having no fewer than four films in the festival) and Colin Farrell, about a teenage boy forming a sinister friendship with a surgeon. Lanthimos is becoming a festival darling and a bit of a sacred deer himself. His 2015 film The Lobster was adored at Cannes, though I was uneasy at its middleweight-arthouse tendencies. But it will be fascinating to see what he has got for us.
Andrey Zvyagintsev is a superb film-maker; his last film, Leviathan, made a stunning impression at Cannes and this new feature, Loveless, about a divorced couple who must somehow work together to find their lost son, looks being as challenging and harrowing as his other work. Sergei Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature is inspired by the Dostoevsky short story from 1876: a woman sends a parcel to her imprisoned husband, but receives it back marked “return to sender” – so must make a long journey to the prison itself to find out what has happened. Loznitsa has only just given us his searing documentary Austerlitz, about modern-day consumerist and tourist attitudes to the Nazi concentration camps. So this promises to be another austere and confrontational work.
US heavyweights are out in force. Todd Haynes is a director whose previous Cannes entry, Carol, was widely adored. His new film in the festival competition is Wonderstruck, a YA-origin drama starring Julianne Moore. This could well be another home-run success for Haynes, or it might be on the edge of commercial sucrose. It will certainly be a hot ticket. The Beguiled, by Sofia Coppola, is both a remake of the 1971 Clint Eastwood movie and an adaptation of the original source material, the 1966 novel A Painted Devil by Thomas P Cullinan. It’s a drama of sexual tension and sexual jealousy set in the American civil war, starring Colin Farrell (again) and Elle Fanning – who is herself becoming a red carpet habitué. Coppola has always carried off her Cannes appearances with some style, with her interesting and underrated costume drama Marie Antoinette and the true-like social-media celeb satire The Bling Ring. This again looks intriguing, if obviously commercial.
Good Time, by the indie New York film-making brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, was described by Thierry Frémaux as a genre movie, and by its star Robert Pattinson as a “psychopath bank-robbery movie”. It will certainly attract the curiosity of those at Cannes who might expect a project like this to be confined to a sidebar like Un Certain Regard or the Directors’ Fortnight, but not the competition.
Kornél Mundruczó is the Hungarian film-maker whose last film, White God, was an extraordinarily staged, non-digital spectacular of dogs being possessed with a Hitchcockian group intelligence – there was something of Sam Fuller there, too. For me, it was a breakthrough from his rather wan auteur mannerisms. His new Cannes film, Jupiter’s Moon, is another feature with a refugee theme.
Lynne Ramsay is back with her You Were Never Really There, and it is always heartening to see Cannes sticking with this wonderful director. Her film is about a war veteran (Joaquin Phoenix) who attempts to save a young woman (Ekaterina Samsonov) from the hell of sex trafficking – but this goes horribly wrong.
A movie by Noah Baumbach, however acidly satirical, will be regarded as the spoonful of sugar which might help the medicine of other choices go down, and a film by him is always an attractive proposition. The Meyerowitz Stories, produced by Netflix, stars Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman, about a family gathering to celebrate their prestigious father. It could be brilliant. Or it could be entirely insufferable.
Talking of insufferable: the persistently smouldering and pouting French actor Louis Garrel returns to Cannes, playing Jean-Luc Godard in Michel Hazanavicius’s La Redoubtable. It is the story of how Godard fell in love with and married his 17-year-old star Anne Wiazemsky during the filming of the 1967 film La Chinoise, and is based on her autobiography Un An Après. Garrel certainly looks the part with shaved-in male-pattern baldness and a sardonic look through dark glasses. It could be great.
Bong Joon-ho’s Okja is another film produced by the now world-conquering Netflix — and intriguingly it is co-written by the South Korean director and British author Jon Ronson. It is both action movie and a monster movie — or creature feature. Okja is a large, gentle animal unknown to conventional science or zoology, who is threatened with kidnapping by shadowy corporate forces, and a young girl protects him. (Bong’s The Host was also a film about a huge monster which attained cult status.) The other Korean master is Hong Sang-soo, whose The Day After promises to be elegant and droll.
120 Beats Per Minutes, starring Adèle Haenel, is a film by Robin Campillo, about the AIDS direct action advocacy group Act Up in the 90s. Campillo is the writer and director known for scripting work by Laurent Cantet, such as Time Out, and the Palme D’Or-winning movie The Class. (Laurent Cantet himself has a movie in Un Certain Regard: L’Atelier.) Elsewhere from France, Jacques Doillon’s Rodin is a biopic about August Rodin, starring Vincent Lindon. The French entries at Cannes are slightly notorious for including classy period pieces which are well upholstered and bland. Let’s hope this isn’t one of them. François Ozon’s L’Amant Double is about a young woman who falls in love with her psychoanalyst. A very startling still from the movie has been released.
Naomi Kawase is the Japanese film-maker whose works divide critics: she has a painterly delicacy and compositional sense which for me was best showcased in her film The Mourning Forest. Some reviewers have confessed themselves impatient with her apparent tendency to the fey and the twee. I myself was unconvinced by her film at Cannes in 2015, An, or Sweet Bean – over-sweet. Her new film in competition, Radiance, is about a woman who has found her vocation writing film prose descriptions for the visually impaired; she falls in love with a photographer who is losing his sight.
As ever, it is a mouthwatering list. But the menu, of course, can look very different to the finished meal. Soon the jury will be announced and we will know more. But the odds are very short on a historic third win for Michael Haneke.
