Issue 11: Cannes 1st Half Roundup
The 69th Cannes International Film Festival is underfoot! And boy what an exciting five days we've had already.
It's commonly agreed upon that last year's festival was wildly disappointing. Even though the serious art house cineastes found plenty of films to like at the various Cannes sidebars (organized by different programmers and judged by separate juries), the main competition lineup was a big disappointment. Maybe it's because so many of the directors with films in competition were making their first stabs at English-language films—it's increasingly in vogue for international directors to ditch their native tongue in the hopes of reaching broader audiences and working with bigger stars. Or maybe it's because it was an off year for so many of the usual suspects; directors like Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, and others were at work or off work. In any case, The Assassin, Carol, and Son of Saul were big players, but the majority of movies competing for the coveted Palme d'Or last year trended downwards in critical and popular reception. Even the ultimate winner, Jacques Audiard's Dheepan, proved to be a head-scratcher, explained away as the revered French director getting his “due”.
That's one of many weird things about Cannes: winning the Golden Palme, the top honor awarded to a film in competition, has a canonicity-defining power to it. Winning the Palme more often than not indicates that a director has been deemed worthy—by the jury, by the festival director, by the critical community; it's a bit murky—of entering the pantheon of Great Working Directors. Look at the names of the last several winners and, though you might not recognize most of them, you can bet that the styles and politics these directors' films embody will trickle down for years to influence new generations of filmmakers and tastemakers:
2010: Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives)
2011: Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life)
2012: Michael Haneke (Amour; he previously won in 2009 for The White Ribbon)
2013: Abdellatif Kechice, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Léa Seydoux (Blue Is the Warmest Color; the first time in the Festival's history the award was awarded to the lead actresses of a film in addition to its director)
2014: Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Winter Sleep)
This topic is obviously more complicated than a short newsletter can describe, but with that bit of background in mind let's talk about how STACKED this year's competition is.
All the directors who were busy at work last year finally had films ready for exhibition, and the final lineup is a doozy: we're talking new movies from Park Chan-Wook, Jeff Nichols, Jim Jarmusch, Cristian Mungiu, Pedro Almodóvar, Xavier Dolan, the Dardenne brothers, Nicholas Winding Refn, Paul Verhoeven, Olivier Assayas, Asghar Farhadi, and…Sean Penn (what can I say, Cannes loves its celebrities).
The filmmaker who seems to have made the biggest splash so far though is a young German director, Maren Ade. Ade's 2 hour and 45 minute-long Toni Erdmann is one of the rare comedies to crack a competition usually headlined by super serious dramas (like the competition opener Sieranevada, the three hour-long Romanian film about, as far as I can figure, Romanians sitting around dinner tables discussing 9/11). At the time of writing, Ade's film has received overwhelmingly positive praise and has sparked whispers of having the Palme in the bag. If a comedy is ever going to win the Palme, it's going to be this year, with George Miller presiding as jury president. And if Ade does indeed win top honors, she'll be only the second female director to have “joined the club”, the first since Jane Campion won the prize (albeit in a tie) in 1993 for The Piano.
(And literally three minutes after I finished writing that paragraph, Sony Picture Classics bought the rights to U.S. distribution for Toni Erdmann—a promising sign for wide exposure in America. The Cannes buyer's market, for that matter, is another topic deserving its own newsletter.)
There's still time for things to change and for other movies to win over festival attendees. The other already-screened films, a slate of movies that includes everything from murderous Korean lesbians in the 1930s to a white trash road trip with Shia LaBeouf (you should know by now that I am never making any of this up), have found their fans but seem unlikely to inspire the right kind of passion for the Palme. And even as this newsletter goes to publication, Jim Jarmusch's Paterson is picking up spectacular notices from critics far and wide. At the end of the day, it's still anyone's guess what will win! Tune in next time for the rundown on the full festival and results.
Articles, News, and Interviews
The greatest flop to ever play at Cannes?
What Alden Ehrenreich's Han Solo coup says about the state of modern movie stardom.
Your favorite movies as long-exposure photographs.
“I do not agree with those who think that it is less expensive to shoot digitally. It’s true that the shooting is less expensive, but the finish costs are more expensive. Color grading is infinitely more expensive than film grading. I used to grade the films in two passes sitting with the color grader in a lab. Now it takes two weeks.” How director Frederick Wiseman funds and films his legendarily long documentaries.
Movie Poster of the Day
Davide Bowie in movie posters.