The annual cinema celebration, fashion show and media circus known as the Cannes Film Festival is in full swing on the French Riviera. From morning screenings to midnight parties, here’s a look at what’s happening:
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PRETTY IN PINK
A fierce wind whipped the Croisette on Friday, but it failed to ruffle Cheryl Fernandez-Versini, who walked the red carpet for Woody Allen’s Irrational Man in a knockout pink gown from British couture house Ralph & Russo.
The pop star, X-Factor judge and British tabloid favourite — formerly known as Cheryl Cole — pulled off a look whose diverse elements came together in almost classical harmony.
In front, the thigh-split gown had a floral-covered plunging neckline, but that was outdone by the other side — backless, but with a train whose folds of draped fabric lent the look a hint of Greek statuary.
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NATALIE PREMIERES HER FIRST
For the second year in a row, the Cannes Film Festival is showcasing the directorial debut of a Hollywood star. This year it’s Natalie Portman’s first feature, A Tale of Love and Darkness.
Adapted from an autobiographical novel by Amos Oz, the film is an ambitious period piece that charts the birth of the state of Israel and a boy’s initiation into the realities of disappointment and death.
The Israel-born Portman also wrote the screenplay and stars in the Hebrew-language feature as the boy’s mother Fania, a cultured and imaginative woman whose dreams can’t withstand grinding everyday reality.
Portman’s film is playing as a special screening outside of the main competition at Cannes — just like Ryan Gosling’s film Lost River did last year.
A Tale of Love and Darkness didn’t draw as strong a response from critics as Lost River, a baroque urban fairy tale generally panned as an ambitious flop.
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WOODY PREMIERES HIS LATEST
Woody Allen returned to the Cannes Film Festival on Friday to show his latest film, Irrational Man, and also address what he called the meaninglessness of life
In Irrational Man, a Rhode Island drama about a despairing academic, Joaquin Phoenix stars as a flask-swilling philosophy professor who has come to dismiss his subject as “verbal masturbation.” As he befriends a young student played by Emma Stone, he contemplates a Dostoyevsky-inspired murder plot.
It’s Allen’s 11th film at Cannes but the 79-year-old writer/director’s films have always played out of competition, as he has long disdained prizes in art.
Irrational Man, due in US theatres July 17, received a mixed reaction on Friday from the critics at Cannes. For Allen film fans, however, the movie had many of his traditional hallmarks. Although set in a new locale for the director, Irrational Man contains familiar struggles with finding meaning in life, a romance with a younger woman and a general lightness of tone even amid the possibility of murder.
Allen told reporters that he and his protagonist both have similar feelings about the usefulness of philosophy.
“There’s no positive answer to the grim reality of life, no matter how much the philosophers talk to you or the priests or the psychologists,” said Allen.
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SNEAKING A SELFIE
The organizers of the Cannes Film Festival aren’t going to like these pictures.
A guest at the premiere of Woody Allen’s Irrational Man, snapped a picture of himself with both Allen and the film’s star, Emma Stone, on the red carpet Friday night — disregarding the wishes of the festival’s director.
Although selfies weren’t explicitly banned, festival director Thierry Fremaux had said that they were “ridiculous and grotesque” and pleaded for self-restraint on selfies as guests walked the red carpet.
Stone smiled during the selfie photo, while Allen looked less than amused.
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COLIN’S FIRST FEST
Colin Farrell is no longer a Cannes Film Festival virgin.
The actor is here for the first time with The Lobster, a decidedly unusual film about single people who have less than two months to find a mate or face being turned into an animal and released into the woods.
Despite being in dozens of films over the past two decades, Farrell told a press conference on Friday that he had never come before — and he didn’t exactly make the most of his inaugural visit.
“I wouldn’t mind being here a little bit longer,” he said.
Farrell shot the movie, in which he stars with Rachel Weisz, in his native Ireland — a bonus for him.
“Everything about this experience was really, really particular for me,” said the actor. “The writing, the cast and the experience in the location we were shooting in.”
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NETFLIX MET WARILY
In Netflix’s first official visit to the Cannes Film Festival, the streaming service’s ambitions have been met warily at the Cote d’Azure cinema capital, a 68-year-old movie palace reverential to the theatre-going experience.
Ted Sarandos, chief content officer of Netflix, appeared on Friday as part of Cannes’ NEXT conference to tout Netflix’s global strategy and its desire to upend the traditional window release schedules of movies. Sarandos drew a packed theatre in the Palais des Festivals, but not all in attendance were swayed by his prognostications.
One French reporter shouted that Netflix will “destroy the film ecosystem in Europe.” Sarandos protested that Netflix would benefit European film. Weinstein Co co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, a collaborator with Netflix who was sitting in the audience, also came to his defence, calling Netflix “a visionary company.”
The confrontation illustrated the unease felt by some at the Cannes Film Festival about the encroachment of digital operators into an art form seen as hallowed in France, the birthplace of cinema.
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REILLY’S NEW LOOK
John C. Reilly has come to the Cannes Film Festival not just fashionably attired, but outfitted with three of the most adventurous films at the festival.
“When in Cannes,” he says stretching out on a rooftop patio in a gleaming white suit, accessorised with a matching hat, two-tone leather brogues and a cane.
The bold look is fitting: Reilly is effectively launching a new chapter for himself at the French Riviera festival. The versatile 49-year-old actor co-stars in two anticipated films in competition for the Palme d’Or, including Italian director Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales, a lavish adaptation of Giambattista Basile’s 17th century Neapolitan fairy tales. Reilly plays a king who, to satisfy the desire of his queen (Salma Hayek) slays a sea monster so that she can eat its heart.
In Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ deadpan dystopian drama The Lobster, Reilly is among the solitary people (along with Colin Farrell and Ben Whishaw) who will be turned into animals if they don’t find a mate. He also has a role in Les Cowboys, the directorial debut of Thomas Bidegain, the French screenwriter of Rust and Bone and A Prophet.
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HOLOCAUST DRAMA STUNS CANNES
A Hungarian film that takes viewers into the hellish heart of the Holocaust has left Cannes reeling.
Son of Saul, the first feature from director Laszlo Nemes, has become an early favourite to win the Palme d’Or and has been praised for reimagining the way the Holocaust is depicted onscreen.
The Hollywood Reporter called the film “remarkable — and remarkably intense,” while Variety judged it “terrifyingly accomplished.” The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw said it was “devastating and terrifying” and praised its “gaunt, fierce kind of courage.”
It’s rare for a director’s first film to be chosen for Cannes’ main competition, rarer still for it to be met with such an enthusiastic response.
Cinematographer Matyas Erdely said on Friday the challenge for the filmmakers was “how to show things that are not possible to show.”
“The genius idea of Lazlo’s was that we just won’t show things that cannot be shown,” he told reporters. “Basically our approach was to exclude everything that is not fundamental to our story.”
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CAPTURING THE CARNIVAL
Amid the wheelers, dealers, oglers and stars, a man with a sketchbook is capturing the carnival that is Cannes.
The world’s most prestigious film festival already attracts thousands of reporters, photographers and camera crews. Now, for the first time in its 68 years, it also has an official artist.
British painter Dan Llywelyn Hall has been appointed to spend the 12-day event wandering the streets, screening rooms and salons with pencils and watercolours.
“The interaction of the people, that’s what interests me, and the social hierarchy,” Hall said, sitting with sketchbook on a terrace overlooking Cannes’ teeming main drag, the Croisette.
Below, tourists craned for a glimpse of the red carpet, delegates mingled and eternally hopeful film fans stood with signs seeking tickets for the day’s packed-out screenings.
“The actors in this place are gods,” Hall said. “The actors are the people everyone worships.”
Hall counts himself, journalists and photographers among “the kingmakers.”
“We make them who they are,” he said. “And then you have the people who sort of support this whole structure.”
