As the echoes of Cannes 2023 die away, it will be remembered as an up-and-down year in a number of ways. The red carpet worked its magic for the tourists and TV cameras, full of French glamour and American stars from Johnny Depp to Harrison Ford, Roberto De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. But behind the scenes, anxious and sleep-deprived press and industry fought for tickets every morning before the theaters were fully booked at 7:10 a.m. Most worrying is the legacy left behind by the two traumatic years of Covid: the regimentation of a Kafkaesque ticketing system that has done more to stress out journalists and market attendees than any other festival innovation, and the growing isolation of festival participants as its inevitable result.
The main competition
This year’s competition line-up reinforced, like never before, the festival’s bias towards auteurs anointed in previous editions, whether or not their latest offerings were worth the honor. The most common line heard on the Croisette was that the main section was stuffed with minor films from major directors, which does no one any favors. But there were happy exceptions, which included 83-year-old Marco Bellocchio’s dramatically exciting and thought-provoking Kidnapped, a summing-up of his many films dealing with the Catholic religion and how a child’s cultural identity is created beginning at a young age. Disappointingly, the jury led by two-time Palme d’Or winner Ruben Ostlund overlooked the film entirely when they awarded their prizes.
Another classic director who returned in top form was 77-year-old Wim Wenders with two masterful films: Anselm, a ravishing 3D documentary portrait of artist Anselm Kiefer, and Perfect Days, a lyrical Japanese-language character study of a Tokyo toilet attendant. Justly winning the Best Actor prize for his Zen-like performance in the latter title was Koji Yakusho.
Of course, it’s not a question of age but of the ability to perceive the world with fresh eyes and extract new meaning with new methods, something most of the films, even the prize-winners, steered away from. Overall, it felt like a very safe competition of films falling into the category of classic, unadventurous fare, including Justine Triet’s French courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall about a middle-class wife accused of murdering her husband that won this year’s Palme d’Or, and Tran Anh Hung’s warm and bubbling The Pot au Feu, celebrating French food connoisseurship, which earned the Cyclo filmmaker Best Director laurels.
One film that opened the door to something new was Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest; its bold reimagining of the “Holocaust movie” made it the most somber and experimental film in the main competition, where it won the Grand Prix. In his first feature for a decade, the Sexy Beast and Under the Skin director offered a formally austere and coolly detached portrait of the horrors of Auschwitz, as glimpsed through the chillingly mundane lives of the camp commandant and his family. By grim coincidence, the film is based on a 2014 novel by Martin Amis, whose death was announced during Cannes. And Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s engrossing trip to Anatolia, About Dry Grasses, delivered a dazzling (and very welcome) shock when the protagonist, on his way to the bedroom scene, makes a long detour backstage through the sound studio. Merve Dizdar, the film’s liberated female lead, won a much-deserved Best Actress award.
A pair of very likable films, despite (or because of) their familiar look, and probably not their makers’ very best work, were Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, a gently melancholy Japanese drama about two 5th grade boys who are too close to each other for their conformist society, and Aki Kaurismaki’s wry working class love story, Fallen Leaves.
Given the fact that almost half the directors in competition were over 60 and chosen for past performance, it was totally perplexing why the revered Spanish-Basque director Victor Erice (82), considered one of Europe’s greatest creators on the basis of just three films (The Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur, Dream of Light), was missing from competition. The world premiere of his first film in 30 years, Close Your Eyes, should have been cause for major celebration; instead, it was tucked away in the ill-defined Cannes Premiere sidebar, where many were unable to see this deeply rewarding reflection on art, memory, identity and passing time. In protest, Erice refused to attend the festival, creating a scandal that far surpassed the frivolous episode of a Cannes policeman shoving festival chief Thierry Fremaux for riding his bicycle on the sidewalk in front of the Carlton Hotel.
Original documentaries
The two documentaries in competition offered much more of a creative edge, particularly Kaouther Ben Hania’s “fictional documentary” Four Daughters, which marked a return to non-traditional documentary forms and brought the Tunisian director back to her strengths at finding creative ways to explore difficult topics – here, a mother who has had two of her four daughters run off to Libya to join the Islamic State. Chinese director Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring) is certainly innovative in its exhaustive and uncompromising portrait of the young men and women who slave over sewing machines making children’s clothing for export, though it becomes repetitive over the course of its three and a half hour running time. Winning both the Un Certain Regard award for Best Director and the L’Oeil D’Or documentary prize was The Mother of All Lies by Moroccan film-maker Asmae El Moudir, which uses hand-made puppets and miniature film sets to re-examine her family’s tense, conflicting memories of a brutal crackdown against anti-government protesters that devastated the director’s neighborhood when she was just a child. The film’s fuzzy lack of factual context is frustrating, but the form is strikingly original.
More women around; Asia shines
Reinforcing Justine Triet’s Palmer d’Or triumph as only the third-ever woman to win the top Cannes prize, this was a good year generally for young female film-makers, often from outside the usual Euro-American art-house heartland. However, it is worth pondering the fact that Triet was the only one of the seven women directors in competition to win anything. The main competition included only one first film and it was a magical realist love story directed by the French-Senegalese Ramata-Toulaye Sy, Banel & Adama, while the increasingly well-regarded Critics’ Week sidebar, recently the launchpad for Aftersun and other breakout hits, this year gave its top award to Malaysian writer-director Amanda Nell Eu’s charming oddity Tiger Stripes. A bold mix of coming-of-age high-school drama and creature feature thriller, Eu’s assured debut feature also cast a critical eye on the constraints that patriarchal societies impose on women’s bodies.
In fact, Asian films did well in all the sections, with Tiger Stripes (Critics Week winner and the buzziest breakout in the program) and Inside the Yellow Cocoon (which scooped the Camera d’Or) leading a very exciting year for young Asian filmmakers. Entries emerged from such little-seen countries as Mongolia (the social realist If I Could Only Hibernate) and Pakistan (In Flames). While South Korea remains the biggest player around, China returned in force with director Wang Bing contributing two films, Youth (Spring) and Man in Black, and Wei Shujun making his fourth appearance at Cannes with the well-liked noir Only the River Flows.
On the other hand
Festivals are more than the sum of their world premieres. They are also the meeting grounds for film professionals who dedicate every leisure moment – including 60-second fly-bys on the Croisette – to exchanging ideas about movies, filmmakers and trends. But thanks to the festival’s new post-Covid online booking system for all screenings, it has become extremely rare to casually gab after seeing films, and serious conversations about the movies is quickly becoming a distant memory.
While pre-booking tickets is a welcome improvement on the previous chaotic approach of standing in long lines outside the venues, with no guarantee of entry, the new automated method routinely denies tickets to press members with lower-level passes, marking screenings as “full” as soon as booking opens, even for films that later turn out to have hundreds of empty seats. Many journalists are now questioning whether they will even make the costly trip to Cannes next year if they have such a low chance of seeing essential films. For the daily press, at least the ticketing system functioned much better than last year, but for programmers and buyers with market badges, the system failed them spectacularly and complaints lasted right up to the final day. It’s so clear that the system of badge-only press screenings needs to be extended to sections like Un Certain Regard, out of respect for all concerned.
