Cannes returns to normality with big movies and contentious debate

Different challenges greeted the second Cannes film festival following the 2020 Covid suspension. Last year, wrapped up in a sub-JG Ballard mini-dystopia, attendees were spitting samples into specimen jars before being allowed entry to the movies. But that programme could draw on two years’ worth of material. Might production delays and the compromises of shooting under pandemic restrictions inhibit the 2022 line up?

The new normal crept into a few prominent premieres. Tilda Swinton’s character wears a mask after returning to London in George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing. Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn encounter PCR tests when crossing borders in Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon. But, those aberrations aside, the programme could hardly have looked more traditional. Former Palme d’Or winners such as the Dardenne brothers, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Cristian Mungiu and Ruben Östlund were back. All of those were, for good or ill, working in a similar vein to their earlier features.

And big, big movies were back. A week after Top Gun: Maverick roared along (and above) Le Croisette, Baz Luhrmann brought his barn-storming, crop-dusting, ear-shattering Elvis! to the festival (okay, the title doesn’t take the Moulin Rouge! exclamation point, but it seems implied). Playing out of competition, the lengthy biopic, starring Austin Butler as Elvis Presley and Tom Hanks as his Mephistophelian manager Colonel Tom Parker, has an unavoidable contradiction at its diamante-studded heart. The film’s reasonable argument is that Parker led Elvis away from his earthy roots and towards a vulgar school of mainstream showbusiness. The problem here is that Luhrmann has himself always dealt in little else but brasher schools of red-curtain glitz. We are figuratively in Vegas decades before Butler’s King actually walks on stage in that city. It’s all noise, effects and overly remixed audio. This is, nonetheless, the Australian director’s least irritating film since Moulin Rouge! Blinking beneath pounds of latex, Hanks relishes the opportunity to play against his usual type. Butler does his best from under a mighty shadow. It’s a shame they are the only even vaguely rounded characters in the picture. Olivia DeJonge’s Priscilla is among many supporting roles lost in the synapse-annihilating typhoon.

What did feel different this year was the level of critical contentiousness. The 75th edition of the Cannes Festival — celebrated with an apparently ramshackle gala mid-event — never felt like a classic, but if you wanted to hear journalists fall out then this was the place to go. Few films were more hotly fought over than the title that eventually won the Palme d’Or: Östlund’s hilarious, unhinged, maritime satire Triangle of Sadness.

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There were further ill-tempered debates over Denis’s dreadful Stars at Noon. Based on a novel by Denis Johnson, the soporific, queasy drama casts Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn as, respectively, a drifty quasi-journalist and a dubious businessman, possibly some sort of spy, entwining sexually in a version of Nicaragua that may as well be Narnia. The book is set in the Sandinista era, but Denis makes little effort to tailor intrigues to the altered politics of the present day. That would matter less if there were any more romantic sparks between Qualley and Alwyn than you would expect to encounter between a mop and a bucket. Snorts erupted around me when Alwyn, no more animated than the country’s native three-toed sloth, muttered the words “I love you”. The film ended up sharing the Grand Prix, the festival’s silver medal.

One day later, it felt as if we had encountered the film that surely would cause positive consensus to ring from every surrounding mountain top. There had been gossip about the quality of Lukas Dhont’s Close all week. The Belgian director, whose excellent Girl won the Camera d’Or for best first film in 2018, returned with a quietly devastating drama about the fracturing of a friendship between two teenage boys. Eden Dambrine and Gustav de Waele give startlingly natural performances as the film moves from nervous tension to a height of emotion that only a filmmaker of prodigious talent could sustain. Set among the flower farms of the director’s homeland, Close was as near as the main competition this year came to a masterpiece. Yet there is a smattering of bad reviews. The French newspaper critics in particular were unimpressed. It would not be entirely correct to say that those who loved Close hated Stars at Noon (or vice versa), but it would not be entirely incorrect either. One should thus give the jury, headed by actor Vincent Lindon, some credit for their diplomatic skills in passing the other half of the Grand Prix to Dhont’s film. By this critic’s reckoning, the second prize was divided between the worst and best films in the competition.

Perhaps the most anticipated title of the second week was David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. The picture played to a Debussy Theatre groaning with attendees yearning to adore the latest body horror from the director of such classics as The Fly and Crash. In truth, the film felt more like an overly dry — albeit with some visceral squelch — commentary on Cronenbergian themes than an original work. Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux play Saul and Caprice, performance artists whose act revolves around the growth of hitherto undocumented human organs in Saul’s body. In a film dominated more by chatter in darkened Greek alleyways than by physical horror, the characters spend many minutes explaining how evolution has gone rogue in this future. As pain and infection decrease, “desktop surgery” is now commonplace. Elsewhere, humans have developed the ability to digest plastics. As we have come to expect, the ideas are fascinating and the milieu of festering discomfort is well maintained. But there is little of the momentum we expect from Cronenberg.

The closest the festival got to an undisputed critical smash was Park Chan Wook’s Decision to Leave. The Korean director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden returned with a thriller concerning a detective who becomes involved with the widow of a recently deceased man in Busan. There are hints of the school of noir in which the cool femme fatale — Barbara Stanwyck, Kathleen Turner — leads the eager patsy astray, but Park brings so much of his comic oddness to the story that those connections quickly fray. Tang Wei, the female lead, never leans into Machiavellian chic, but remains believably empathetic throughout. Decision to Leave is, perhaps, not up with Park’s best, but no fan of the director will be left unsatisfied.

The Dardennes and Hirokazu Kore-eda were here to do what they have been doing so well for decades. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes, twice-honoured with the Palme, brought us a typically engaging, naturalistic drama entitled Tori and Lokita. The film stars Mbundu Joely as Lokita, a teenager who, having befriended the younger Tori (Pablo Schils) while they were travelling to Belgium from different African countries, now poses as his sister to assist with her residency application. The directors are, as ever, guilty of occasional contrivance, but the relationship between the two leads is eerily convincing. The Dardennes’ best work since Two Days, One Night in 2014.

Kore-eda, Japanese master of emotional nano-dynamics, who won here for Shoplifters in 2018, travelled to France for his drama The Truth in 2019. He stays a little closer to home with Broker. Set in Korea, the film tells the story of rogues who steal babies abandoned at the local church and sell them on the adoption black market. There is too much plot here. The police are on their tale. A murder is announced. A black widow hires hoodlums to pursue her dead husband’s lover. But, as so often in Kore-eda’s films, an unconventional family comes together to charm and distract. The closing scenes are emotional killers. Song Kang-ho, star of Parasite and many other Korean gems, took the best actor prize from the jury for playing a loveable hustler.

There was more. Kelly Reichardt’s charming Showing Up cast Michelle Williams as a sculptor making the best of things among the often infuriating Bohemian denizens of outer Portland. Will she get her hot water back? Will the injured pigeon survive the night? A lovely low-key confirmation of Reichardt’s gentle gifts. In contrast, Saeed Roustayi’s teeming Leila’s Brothers told a tale of economic calamity among a decaying family in contemporary Iran.

There was as much strong material playing outside the competition as there was within it. Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream managed the impressive task of convincing that there is room for another documentary on David Bowie. His delightfully peculiar film strung together a mass of archival footage — much of it familiar — into an eccentric but fluid montage that gave a decent impression of the late singer’s creative process.

And more and more. The sheer amount of impressive films playing in the official selection and in parallel sidebars confirms that the industry is still delivering quality at a busy rate. The concern is how many of these pictures will make it to cinemas. Well, A24 forked out for US rights on Close and the hugely admired Aftersun starring Paul Mescal. MUBI took other territories — including this one — on both those films. Neon bought its third Palme d’Or winner in a row with Triangle of Sadness. So there is still financial interest in cultural cinema. Neon also managed to take Parasite all the way to the best picture Oscar. Could they …

No, let’s not start that yet. It’s barely summer.