Whether you call it “the Olympics of cinema” (for more bloodsporting types) or “the world’s most prestigious movie gathering” (for the more genteel among us), the Cannes Film Festival is the most scrutinised of any other such confab.
Long before the films are screened, the line-up is dissected with the intensity of a presidential campaign. What directors and countries make it in, which section of the festival a film lands in, what’s left out and why are all matters of no small amount of pundit hand-wringing and palm-reading.
After all, as with the coastal Riviera social scene, where you are is as important as who you are.
The 2015 Cannes slate, announced on Thursday by festival director Thierry Fremaux at his traditional Paris press conference, offered plenty of such areas of inquiry. Of the 16 films revealed for the coveted main competition category, nearly half were from just two countries — France and Italy.
The home country will be represented by four films, including the grit-auteur Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan, and Mon Roi, the latest effort from the mythic single-monikered Maiwenn (she was married to Luc Besson as a teenager and won the 2011 jury prize with the ambitious Polisse), as well as movies from natives Stephane Brize and Valerie Donzelli. That’s on top of another French movie, Emmanuelle Bercot’s French-language La Tete Haute, opening the festival out of competition.
Italy will send three delegates: favourite sons Matteo Garrone, Nanni Moretti and Paolo Sorrentino, the latter returning not 15 months after winning the foreign-language Oscar for his previous Cannes movie The Great Beauty.
At the same time, the absence of any Spanish-language film in the competition caused some consternation, as evidenced by the Spanish-language journalist who gave a que tiene to Fremaux at the post-announcement press conference. (Fremaux said that a Spanish-language film may yet be tacked on to the main competition; the festival leaves room for 11th-hour additions.)
A similar puzzling absence befell French director Arnaud Desplechin. Despite the high hometown quotient, the auteur’s much anticipated My Golden Years, a prequel to his 1996 hit My Sex Life ... or How I Got Into an Argument, was missing.
There had been reports that Desplechin was offered the opening slot for the prize-eligible, but lower profile Un Certain Regard section and turned it down. But far from explaining matters, that only raised further questions — why wasn’t he offered a main competition slot? Was it him or was it the movie?
When Fremaux left open the possibility that My Golden Years could be added to the competition at the last minute, that, of course, set off more chatter.
For their part, the typically strong Brits had a meek showing — only one movie made it into competition — with the help of an Aussie director. The British production of Macbeth with Michael Fassbender is directed by Australia’s Justin Kurzel.
The Americans acquitted themselves reasonably well. In contrast to past years when there were as many four films in competition, this year sees a more modest but still respectable two — Gus Van Sant’s suicide drama The Sea of Trees with Matthew McConaughey and Todd Haynes’ period lesbian tale Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara.
The selection of Haynes has already generated much cheering in US cinema circles. The indie filmmaker hadn’t been to the Croisette since he brought Velvet Goldmine there 17 years ago, and the fact that he was offered a slot for Carol was, to many, an encouraging sign for him, his movie and even the state of American art house cinema.
Van Sant, meanwhile, was something of a question mark coming in because his last Cannes visit, in 2011 with Restless, earned him a berth only into Un Certain Regard and was not warmly received; the admission of Trees to the main competition seemed to signal brighter times.
If there won’t be more American films competing for prizes, it’s in part the result of other circumstances. A number of US movies will screen out of competition — most notably Woody Allen’s Irrational Man, a darker existential piece starring Joaquin Phoenix (Allen prefers to stay removed from the awards game).
Two big-budget animated films — Pixar’s Inside Out, directed by Pete Docter, and the international production The Little Prince from Kung Fu Panda director Mark Osborne — will also screen out of competition, as will Natalie Portman’s directorial debut, a period Hebrew-language film titled A Tale of Love and Darkness.
Portman well could have been in Un Certain Regard, but Fremaux said he decided not to put her there. That’s because in past years, when he’d included movies directed by North American actors such as Ryan Gosling and James Franco, he heard cries of celebrity favouritism. So a large number of Yanks will get their place on the Croisette, but not on the awards podium.
Still, for all the fun that observers have in this spring rite of slate slicing, some caveats might be applied.
Inclusions, after all, are not always reflective of a great national-cinema ferment, while absences are not always mysterious.
“A lot of things are said at the outset — that this movie will be at Cannes or that movie will be at Cannes when there’s never a question of this film being in Cannes,” Fremaux said. “In some cases the movie isn’t even made yet.”
Numerous factors having to do with red carpets, actor scheduling, director make-goods (Van Sant, for instance, had accepted a lower-profile Un Certain Regard slot, the kind of gesture that can earn goodwill with programmers) and other less aesthetic concerns also often come into play.
So does coincidence. The three Italians in competition, for instance, are all returnees — they just rarely finish movies in the same year.
And even those so-called Italian movies aren’t clearly so Italian. Moretti and Garrone’s films titled Youth and Tale of Tales — are English-language efforts filled with stars from countries further west such as Rachel Weisz and John C. Reilly. At Cannes, the lessons can be murky. Even the national boundaries aren’t always clear.