The Cannes Festival’s ability to survive and prosper defies logic. The spring bash on the Côte d’Azur and its autumnal rival in Venice, both of which weathered the Covid crisis with notable resilience, dominate cultural cinema as much as they have ever done in their long histories. Half of the 10 best-picture nominees at this year’s Oscars premiered at one event or the other. Three of those were at Cannes in 2023. Two years ago, Paramount chose Cannes to launch the cinema-saving phenomenon that was Top Gun: Maverick. In other words, the industry still believes. So pay attention . . .
1. The most Irish Cannes ever?
No year has recently come close. A (we think) unprecedented five films in the official selection are Irish productions or coproductions. Dublin’s unstoppable Element Pictures brings one title to the main competition, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, and two to the parallel Un Certain Regard strand: Ariane Labed’s September Says and Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice is a coproduction by the Irish company Tailored Films. Lovely Productions, another domestic operation, coproduces Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer, which plays in the midnight-screenings section. Barry Keoghan is here. Robbie Ryan, Oscar-nominated director of photography, has two films in competition. One of which is the subject of the next entry.
2. The Poor Things team are already back
A little more than two months after they won three Academy Awards, Yorgos Lanthimos and friends walk the red carpet with Kinds of Kindness, a triptych that, on the evidence of a zippy trailer, looks to be recapturing the more austere weirdness of the director’s early Greek work. Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe from Element are back producing. Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley also take the leap from Things to Kindness. Robbie Ryan remains behind the camera. “Cannes is the best place to show a film for the first time,” he told me at the recent Iftas. “It’s the best bit of what we do.”
3. Barry Keoghan is on the Med
We don’t know quite why the Dubliner pulled out of Ridley Scott’s upcoming sequel to Gladiator, but it gave him the opportunity to savour the excitement around Saltburn and to focus attention on the new Andrea Arnold flick. Observers of that admired English director will be amused to note that she won an Oscar with her short film Wasp, played the post-Covid Cannes with her doc Cow and now returns with a drama called Bird. What animal will come next? The prospect of a clash between Keoghan and the charismatic German actor Franz Rogowski could hardly be more exciting. Expect more gritty naturalism from Arnold and more lively camerawork from Ryan.
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4. What the hell is Megalopolis?
As many as nine directors have won the Palme d’Or twice, but nobody has managed that feat three times. The latest to try, after wins in the 1970s for The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, is Francis Ford Coppola. The veteran director’s trials with his ambitious allegorical epic have spawned miles of speculative commentary. Adam Driver heads a cast that also includes Giancarlo Esposito, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne and Dustin Hoffman. It is believed Coppola financed the $120 million project out of his own pocket. A lot is riding on the first reactions.
5. What is that Donald Trump thing going to be like?
The Apprentice stars Sebastian Stan, hitherto Bucky Barnes in the MCU, as Donald Trump during the early years of his real-estate career. Just as exciting is the prospect of Jeremy Strong, the breakout star of Succession, as the notorious US lawyer Roy Cohn: McCarthyite enforcer, ruthless political fixer, persecutor of the Rosenbergs and all-round unlovable guy. The Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi, whose Holy Spider was a critical hit here two years ago, is back in the director’s chair. Sure to make both the news and arts pages in an election year.
6. How did the Hollywood strikes alter the selection?
Not so much as feared. Thierry Frémaux, the festival’s director, acknowledged that the actors’ and writers’ disputes of last autumn may have caused problems for the delivery of American titles. As things worked out, more than a third of the competition titles are in English, and stars such as Gary Oldman and Selena Gomez appear in films by, respectively, Italian and French directors. A few delayed titles will have made their way to Venice instead. But Frémaux will be content that his red carpet remains jammed with recognisable faces for the normie press.
7. Explain that Kevin Costner episodic thing to me
This is the year of the personal project. While Coppola was struggling with Megalopolis, Kevin Costner, back in the spotlight after the success of Yellowstone on the small screen, was wrestling with a western epic he proposed first back in 1988. Horizon: An American Saga now arrives as two long features – with two more proposed – the first of which premieres at Cannes out of competition. The trailer suggests that every desired trope of the genre is in play. The director stars opposite Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Danny Huston and, as they used to say, a cast of thousands.
8. How’s the star wattage on the jury?
High enough. Fresh from directing the biggest film of 2023, Greta Gerwig heads a jury featuring more actors than usual. The French star Eva Green and the recent Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone will join the Barbie wrangler on the carpet each night. Nadine Labaki, director of the recent Cannes favourite Capernum, returns to cast her vote. Also around the table are the Spanish director JA Bayona, the Turkish screenwriter Ebru Ceylan, the French actor Omar Sy, the Italian actor and producer Pierfrancesco Favino and the Palme d’Or-winning director Hirokazu Kore-eda. Good luck trying to anticipate a trend from that disparate group.
9. Three greats are in competition
French cineastes have always enjoyed the North American greats and will therefore be celebrating the appearance of three veterans in the race for the Palme d’Or. As noted above, Coppola is here with Megalopolis. David Cronenberg, who came close to winning with Crash, when Coppola was head of the jury in 1996, is back with a typically uneasy looking project called The Shroud. Paul Schrader, writer of Taxi Driver, which won the Palme in 1976, arrives with a Russell Banks adaptation entitled Oh, Canada. It seems unlikely all three will compete against each other again.
10. Napoléon comes home
The Route Napoléon, which traces the emperor’s journey to Paris after landing back from exile on Elba, begins a mere hundred metres or so from the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès (around the corner from the Irish bar). It therefore seems appropriate that Cannes Classics, the strand dedicated to vintage cinema, opens with a newly restored print of part one of Abel Gance’s masterpiece Napoléon. Completed in 1927, the extraordinary epic was largely unseen in its vast “Polyvision” version until a famous restoration by Kevin Brownlow in 1981.
11. The Mad Max saga is back
Few titles seemed more certain to launch here than George Miller’s fifth film in the Mad Max sequence. The Oscar-hoovering Mad Max: Fury Road premiered on the Croisette in 2015. A year later, Miller returned to head the jury. In 2022, his odd fable Three Thousand Years of Longing premiered out of competition. When it was announced that Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a prequel to Fury Road starring Anya Taylor-Joy, was to open commercially on May 24th, the game was clearly up. Will surely play well on the Lumiere Theatre’s booming speakers.
12. So what’s going to win the Palme?
A fool’s game. Nobody knows how the jury might lean. That has not stopped the canny Vienna-based film professional Neil Young from having a go each year. He puts The Apprentice second favourite, at 5/1, but anoints Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, an Indian drama, as the one to beat, at 5/2. “Female writer-directors in their 30s and 40s have been very successful at Cannes . . . in the last few years, and I’d certainly expect a jury headed by Greta Gerwig to continue that trend,” he tells me. Should Lanthimos win he will become the first director to hold the Cannes Palme d’Or and the Venice Golden Lion simultaneously.
The 77th Cannes film festival runs from Tuesday, May 14th, until Saturday, May 25th
