Does De Niro slag off Trump? Is a cockle wet?
The opening bash at Cannes film festival is usually weirdly French. Someone plays the piano accordion while mimes re-enact the storming of the Bastille. That sort of thing. But once the tribute to Juliette Binoche, the Oscar-winning president of the 2025 competition jury, is done, this year’s opener proves notably American.
We get a eulogy for the late Palme d’Or winner David Lynch. Then Leonardo DiCaprio gives a genuinely moving speech before presenting Robert De Niro with his honorary Palme d’Or. “Not another great actor. He was the actor,” the younger man remembers thinking.
Does De Niro slag off Donald Trump? Is a cockle wet? “America’s philistine president has had himself appointed head of one of America’s premier cultural institutions,” he says. “He has cut funding and support to the arts, humanities and education. And now he announced a 100 per cent tariff on films made outside the United States. You can’t put a price on connectivity.”
Then Quentin Tarantino turns up to declare the festival open and to literally drop his mike.
Cannes film festival 2025 quiz: What is the Palme d’Or-winning film on this year’s poster?
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Cannes 2025: DiCaprio pays moving tribute to De Niro, Binoche passes verdict on Depardieu, and I avoid red-carpet nudity
Binoche passes verdict on Depardieu
It hardly needs to be said that the news about Gérard Depardieu being found guilty of sexually assaulting two women on the set of a 2021 film has dominated conversation on La Croisette.
Even before the verdict came in, Thierry Fremaux, artistic director of the event, was being asked about it. “The festival, and you, and public opinion – we have to deal with this on a case-by-case basis,” he said. “I’m happy the press conference is being held today, not tomorrow.”
Juliette Binoche, president of the jury, was also asked to comment and responded in slightly cryptic fashion. “He’s not a monster,” she said. “He’s a man who lost his aura owing to facts that occurred and were looked at by a court. The star of a film is a king for me. [But] what is sacred is when you create, when you act, and he is no longer sacred … Now the power lies elsewhere.”
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Prosecutors say that the star of Cyrano de Bergerac, Green Card and several hundred other films should now be tried in a separate rape investigation prompted by allegations from Charlotte Arnould, a 29-year-old actor.
Binoche, who is chairing a nine-strong jury that also includes Halle Berry, Payal Kapadia, Alba Rohrwacher and Leïla Slimani, says Cannes has a duty of care to women who attend. “They have an awareness of the actions they need to take and understand the need for people to speak out about the abuses they have suffered. It’s an important time. The #MeToo movement came here later than it did to America, but it’s here now.”
More bang for your buck
One thing you learn quickly at Cannes is that there are several parallel festivals. Some people are here to show films in the official selection and associated prestige strands. Others are here to raise money for films that don’t yet exist. A few are somewhere in between.
Ed Guiney, the busy Irish producer who founded Element Pictures with Andrew Lowe at the beginning of the century, has done all of that and more. This year he and Element are back in the Un Certain Regard strand with two buzzy features: Pillion, Harry Lighton’s British biker flick, and My Father’s Shadow, Akinola Davies jnr’s Nigerian drama.
“It’s a festival and it’s a market,” Guiney explains. “And if you have a film – especially a smaller film that doesn’t have massive stars – and it gets critically well received and makes an impact in the festival then that really, really drives the film.”
He points to last year’s Palme d’Or winner (and Oscar best-picture champ).
“You look at something like Anora last year,” he says. “Although Sean Baker is a well-known film-maker, none of the actors in his film were well known. And it goes from a really successful Cannes competition screening to winning the Oscar.”
In 2024 Guiney was here with Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness. Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Jesse Plemons starred in that competitor for the Palme d’Or. Is it a different business in the less heated Un Certain Regard?
“There’s less pressure in Un Certain Regard,” he says. “Like with Kinds of Kindness last year – or any big red-carpet film – there are legions of people to look after them. But, if it’s a smaller film, it can be very expensive. And you try and do what you can.”
Does he still get excited about the whole thing now?
“It’s a very nice coming together for everyone who made a film,” he says. “It’s really exciting, obviously. And for first-time film-makers like Akinola and Harry it’s brilliant.”
That sounds like a yes.
“It’s what you dream of, really.”
Galway-shot drama gets Great 8 nod
Cannes is the premiere spot to drum up interest in productions that have not yet reached completion, and few schemes have had more success in this area than the Great 8 showcase.
Funded by the British Film Institute and the British Council, the project invites film-makers to screen footage to potential buyers and festival programmers. This year Rebekah Fortune’s Learning to Breathe Under Water, an eccentric Galway-shot drama starring Rory Kinnear, Maria Bakalova and the fresh face Ezra Carlisle, gets the nod.
Patrick O’Neill, whose company Wildcard recently had such success distributing Kneecap, is a producer on the film. “Previous projects selected were things like Aftersun and Saint Maud,” O’Neill says. “Kneecap was actually one of the projects about two years ago. So there is good form there. Essentially the eight films are selected and are given prime placement. Obviously that gets a lot of trade coverage.”
Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, of course, later returned to Critics’ Week at Cannes and ultimately earned an Oscar nomination for Paul Mescal. This tells us something about what goes on away from the noisy premieres. Great 8 is dealing in films that may not land at festivals for a year.
“They would have completed principal photography,” O’Neill explains. “So they would be in the post-production phase, which can last anything from six months to a year, depending on the film.”
He sounds bullish about Learning to Breathe Under Water.
“Rebekah’s a very interesting film-maker,” O’Neill says. “She is from a working-class background in Birmingham. She’s an autistic person. The film is about a young boy called Leo who is autistic. He lives with his father, played by the great Rory Kinnear, and his wife in the movie has passed away. They’re kind of still to come to terms with that.”
The launch here helps a lot.
“It elevates you above the noise,” O’Neill says.
Bianca Censori and red-carpet nudity
Over 15 years of covering the Cannes film festival I have managed to avoid the inconvenience of an evening red-carpet premiere. Obviously, such affairs are the ones that attract the most celebrities, but the downside is that you have to turn up in a dinner jacket or a posh frock.
As a religious devotee of the overhead bag alone when flying, I have never carried any such garment to the Riviera. Bono eventually talked me into it. Not literally. I saw no other easy way of catching Andrew Dominik’s Bono: Stories of Surrender than trumping up the red steps of the Auditorium Louis Lumière lateish on Friday night.
So has this altered my packing regimen? Not a bit of it. I now have practical evidence that you can pack a suit and a pair of black shoes into an already groaning overhead bag. Sure, it may be a bit creased, but these are work clothes – like overalls.
At any rate, readers need have no fear that I will transgress the latest sartorial regulation from the Cannes commissars. “For decency reasons,” the edict states, “nudity is prohibited on the red carpet, as well as any other area of the festival.”
This seems a reaction to the recent quasi-nude high jinks of Bianca Censori, Kanye West’s wife, and of other exhibitionists risking goosebumps outside events such as the Grammys.
One more observation on the festival’s new dress regulations. Apparently there is a prohibition on “voluminous outfits, in particular those with a large train”. No less a star than Halle Berry felt herself forced to make a change before being introduced at the opening ceremony. “I had an amazing dress by Gupta that I cannot wear tonight because it’s too big of a train,” she told Variety. She turned up instead in a striking striped affair by Jacquemus.
Review: Partir un Jour/Leave One Day
What is the opening film at Cannes for? That is not an easy question to answer. Some years it’s a big dumb blockbuster like The Da Vinci Code. Sometimes it’s a risky art-house film like Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights. At one stage you could bet your house on it being the latest Woody Allen.
When the organisers go for a “discovery”, punters often reasonably wonder, “If it’s such a revelation why is not in the main competition?”
Amélie Bonnin’s Partir un Jour – the first debut film to ever kick off events – just about makes the case for its unexpected selection. It’s a sort of semi-committed musical in the key of all things French.
Juliette Armanet stars as Cécile, a talented chef returning home to visit dad (François Rollin) following his heart attack. She is aiming for a Michelin star after excelling at a high-end food show on the telly. He runs what, if the film is to be believed, the French consider a humble motorway cafe and, for all the simplicity of its decor, many Irish would consider the sort of place you’d expect to drop a ton a head.
Early on we learn that the protagonist is unexpectedly pregnant and has concealed that fact from the father. She intends to have an abortion, but, in later stages, we suspect unspoken doubts are eating away.
For the most part the tensions here are low-key. Father and daughter squabble at bantamweight division. Chats with an old boyfriend don’t look to be going anywhere serious.
Played out to an unthreatening collection of new songs and retooled hits by the likes of Céline Dion and The Temptations, Partir un Jour proves an eminently pleasant way to kick off affairs
Better that than another Da Vinci Code.
