Cannes 2022: The Verdict

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VERDICT:

Along with the shiny gold button given to badge-holders celebrating Cannes’ 75th glorious anniversary, this year’s festival can justly be hailed as a return to normality after the Covid-19 pandemic canceled it in 2020 and severely truncated it in 2021. Whether it’s the normality we all hoped to see is another question. Yes, masks were gone – perhaps one festival-goer in a hundred wore them indoors – but Covid has left a legacy of bureaucracy in its wake that isn’t likely to go away.

The biggest among the changes is that a badge is no longer enough to see a movie: a badge plus a ticket downloaded to a smart phone is required. The first days of the festival were chaos as the online ticketing system first stalled and then crashed, an IT disaster that should have been foreseen and prevented, given that the thousands of press and industry reps do not come to Cannes on vacation but to watch films for their livelihood and literally can’t afford to miss screenings. Even though the system was up and running relatively quickly, it soon became apparent that there weren’t enough tickets/seats to go round. (Have there ever been?)

In past years many colleagues with non-priority “blue” badges lined up for hours, only to be turned away at the door when popular screenings filled up, so the keyword of the new ticketing is “democratic,” though in reality color-coding remains firmly in place and the festival is hardly invested in equality. Fortunately, special morning press screenings eliminated the ticket issue for anyone writing about competition films for the daily press. But the system also eliminated spontaneity: you can’t just walk into a screening at the last minute because someone you met was enthusiastic about it. With its seemingly unlimited resources, isn’t it time Cannes requisitioned or built more screening rooms around the Croisette-Rue d’Antibes area and took away the “early bird gets the worm” stress and anxiety of hungrily searching for tickets online at 7:00 a.m. every day?

And what about the fallout on the films and filmmakers? At least part of the reason why the reception of so many films was relatively tepid this year had to do with the way Cannes rejigged the screening schedule. We used to have a chance to watch films with our colleagues, sitting in the same familiar spot, and a buzz would be created during and right after the film, which then mushroomed into word-of-mouth success. But by splintering the press screenings between different cinemas and at different times (and by having assigned sections or seat numbers), we spent most of our time surrounded by strangers and unknown faces. Apart from taking away from any festival’s normally bracing sense of industry camaraderie, it’s impossible to create buzz with people you don’t know. Next year the restrictions need to loosen up so it’s enjoyable to attend films again and possible to exchange ideas about them. And one prays that tickets will be uploaded to the badges like in Venice, eliminating the need for cell phones.

But a much greater anxiety stalked the Croisette. Behind the glitz and the gossip, Cannes always likes to stress its political engagement with the wider world and, inevitably, Russia’s ongoing brutal invasion of Ukraine loomed large. It proved contentious even weeks before the festival opened when Michel Hazanavicius was forced to change the original French title of his enjoyably goofy zombie comedy Final Cut from Z (Comme Z) to Coupez! to avoid association with the letter Z, now tainted as a symbol of Russian military aggression. The festival’s swank opening night featured a stirring video address from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who quoted Charlie Chaplin’s anti-fascist classic The Great Dictator: “The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people.” The juxtaposition of a big-screen president at war and a gala audience in all their finery was awkward, to say the least. The very next day, as French military jets swooped over Cannes to promote Tom Cruise’s latest war-porn blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick, the irony and cognitive dissonance were even more palpable.

There was no Russian pavilion in Cannes this year. But while other festivals have issued blanket bans on films from Russia, Cannes made a statement by including director Kirill Serebrennikov’s feeble period drama Tchaikovsky’s Wife in the main competition. “We don’t want to boycott Russian artists,” Cannes boss Thierry Frémaux explained. “We want to express the strength of our support for the Ukrainian people and our opposition to the war of aggression being waged by Vladimir Putin.” Serebrennikov himself is an exiled anti-Putin critic who faces house arrest if he returns to Moscow, but his Cannes slot still proved controversial, especially when he defended his film’s financial backer, sanctioned oligarch Roman Abramovich. “Boycotting Russian culture strikes me as unbearable,” he protested. “Russian culture has always promoted human values.”

Cannes further reflected on the conflict by programming Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s austere, archive-driven anti-war documentary A Natural History of Destruction. Poignantly, the documentary jury gave a special prize to Mariupolis 2, an intimate observational film made inside the devastated war-zone city of Mariupol by Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravi?ius, who was killed by Russian forces during the shoot. The war even spilled off the screen and onto the red carpet when a young woman stripped naked outside the gala premiere of George Miller’s time-travelling fantasy epic Three Thousand Years of Longing, her body painted blue and yellow in Pussy Riot-style protest against alleged Russian army rapes in Ukraine. Welcome to Cannes, where humanity’s worst crimes become street theatre.

The festival’s big prize-winner was Triangle of Sadness, a scattergun black comedy from sharp-clawed Swedish social satirist Ruben Östlund, who took home his second Palme d’Or after the thematically similar art-world critique The Square (2017). A wide-ranging condemnation of the fashion industry, beauty as currency, obscene wealth and white male privilege, Östlund’s roaringly funny luxury-cruise farce divided critics, just as he surely intended. But it was also the perfect winning film for Cannes, holding up a cruelly funny mirror to the conspicuous consumption, overpriced catwalk glamour and hierarchical class systems that define this glitzy French festival now more than ever.

Much grumbling was heard following the awards ceremony when the jury inexplicably split two of the main prizes, weakening their meaning and generating speculation that consensus was impossible. Most surprising was the awarding of the Grand Jury prize to two very different films: Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon received a decidedly mixed critical reception, though it could well be because the film didn’t conform to expectations – an odd thought, given that Denis has always played with narrative forms while sticking to her signature concerns of power and neocolonialism seen through the prism of complex male-female relations. Many attendees were surprised that Lukas Dhont’s trenchant sophomore film Close didn’t get the gold, given how the film offers a devastating critique of society’s demonization of same-sex intimacy, even of a pre-sexual kind, while encouraging violence.

Compared to last year’s calm and wonderfully programmed July edition, this year saw a return of many of the usual suspects (the Dardennes, Desplechin, Cronenberg, Kore-eda) with fairly mediocre films. Frémaux’s rule to invite alumni back to competition no matter what they’ve made has always been one of the main problems with that program, resulting in fewer slots available for more audacious works. An exception to the rule was Armageddon Time, perhaps the finest of the intimate American family dramas directed by James Gray, who has been in competition multiple times without winning anything. Its oblique mention of the Trump family’s influence on Queens’ élite found an unexpected parallel in Leila’s Brothers, Saeed Roustaee’s epic Iranian family drama, which out of necessity had to slip in its social critique of a regime that has reduced half the country’s population to poverty and drug abuse.

Amidst middling fare from the old boys’ club, Albert Serra’s Pacifiction and Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up were pleasant outliers, inventive, engaging films that injected a twisted take on genre cinema – film noir for Serra, comedy for Reichardt – into their very different character studies of spiky individuals. Though critically acclaimed, they received nowt from the Vincent Lindon-led jury, which is baffling considering the inflated number of awards going around.

The general critical consensus on the ground seemed to be that there were relatively few standouts this year, with a lot of flawed but interesting films but few surprises or discoveries. Many highly praised films turned up in the official sidebar Un Certain Regard, like Maryam Touzani’s The Blue Caftan, Emin Alper’s Burning Days, Emily Atef’s More Than Ever, Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, Saim Sadiq’s Joyland and above all Hylnur Palmason’s stunningly made Godland, which virtually everyone agreed should have played in the main competition.

It was a banner year for classic rock icons in Cannes, with Baz Luhrmann’s ravishingly overblown baroque’n’roll biopic Elvis making its splashy world premiere out of competition. The genius of David Bowie was also celebrated in Brett Morgen’s blockbuster collage documentary Moonage Daydream, a shallow but visually dazzling odyssey through the late art-rock legend’s live performances and archive interviews. Bottom of the bill in this excess-all-areas musical carnival was Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, an oddly perfunctory portrait of rock’s piano-pummeling wild man directed by Ethan Coen, working without brother Joel for the first time. This disappointingly minor work from a major filmmaker only made a future Coens’ reunion, teasingly hinted at by Ethan in his Cannes interviews, all the more essential. Older brother, where art thou?

The final question is, of course, does any of it matter? How much does Cannes count outside the bubble it’s always been, in terms of the market, the public and the press? Speaking of the latter, the French press was heavily invested this year and their coverage was back to normal levels, with daily radio and TV broadcasts on the festival and plenty of daily press. There were new outlets both sponsoring and covering the proceedings (France Télévisions, Brut and TikTok instead of Canal +), but it’s uncertain whether the public was following as obsessively as in the pre-Covid past. We’ll see what kind of numbers the big Cannes films do at the French box office now that the pandemic is no longer in the way.

As for the US, where Cannes was once major movie news for four or five days, if not more, in 2022 it was rarely the top featured story on the trades’ homepage, unless it was to tout a mega-film like Top Gun: Maverick or Elvis. In terms of the US and international market, there were some new players (such as Mubi, which is putting a lot more money into films than before) scooping up titles, as did now familiar outlets like Neon, A24, Sony Pictures Classics and IFC, so the market wasn’t all that weak — though again, it usually came down to a handful of buzz titles. The question again is whether people will go and see any of these movies when they come out — because if they don’t, then it’s debatable whether Cannes can maintain its reputation as one of the entertainment industry’s biggest events, just as it’s questionable whether arthouse cinema will persist as it has up to now in the years to come.