And so the first green shoots of spring emerge, the clocks go forward, the first cuckoo is distantly heard, and the Cannes film festival’s official selection list is announced. The festival begins on May 11. Always an exciting time for cineastes, cinephiles, Francophiles, Euro-celebrity connoisseurs, nerds, red-carpet fanciers and of course critics.
These are the films that — like it or not — will dominate discussion of world cinema for the year, until the more obvious awards-bait English-language pictures emerge in the autumn.
Diversity has become a keynote topic in cinema, and though #CannesSoWhite may not become an issue in 2016 it is something on which Cannes does not escape scrutiny, certainly considering that it is avowedly an international and global platform, which the Academy awards are not. Famously, Cannes and the French cultural establishment are far more briskly impervious to web-fuelled social media criticism of this sort.
Last year, festival director Thierry Fremaux smartly dismissed complaints about women without high-heeled shoes being refused entry to red-carpet screenings — untrue and not policy, he said, and that was that. In Britain or the US, such a row would have concluded with a grovelling apology from the director. Not Cannes.
Well, there are no women of colour among the directors in the selection, although there are women — Andrea Arnold , Nicole Garcia and Maren Ade — in competition. In the Un Certain Regard sidebar, there is more ethnic variation, with filmmakers such as Mohammadd Diab, Behnam Behzadi and the Chad director Mahamet Saleh-Haroun. It is traditional for critics to claim that Un Certain Regard is where the real interest is, and where the soul of the festival resides. There’s more diversity there, to be sure. More light may be shed when the jury is announced.
There are (so far) no indications of more films to be added to the already bulging list. There is no official closing film scheduled — the festival will conclude with the Palme d’Or winner.
Out of competition there are heavy hitters such as Steven Spielberg with his version of Roald Dahl’s The BFG and Jodie Foster with her brassy Hollywood think-piece thriller Money Monster, starring George Clooney as the brash host of a financial talkshow who is held hostage live on air by a desperate anti-capitalism protester. It’s a selection that, as ever, showcases the festival’s avowed masters, such as Ken Loach, Jim Jarmusch, Pedro Almodovar and the Dardennes: the silverback gorillas of the arthouse circuit.
The Dardenne brothers — twice winners of the Palme d’Or — are back with their La Fille Inconnue, or The Unknown Girl, with Adele Haenel, about a doctor who sets out to find the identity of a young woman who died after refusing surgery.
Loach returns — despite having stated that he was withdrawing from fiction features — with his longtime screenwriter Paul Laverty, with I, Daniel Blake, a tough indictment of food-bank Britain and the poverty trap. Almodovar’s Julieta is an adaptation of three interrelated short stories by Alice Munro from her 2004 collection Runaway. A middle-aged woman endures anguish when her teenage daughter runs away from home and discovers something about her mother.
It is a big year for Britain, with another Cannes favourite being featured: Andrea Arnold returns with her American Honey, featuring Shia LaBeouf and Sasha Lane, about a travelling crew of exploited teenagers who get an itinerant job in the midwest, selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. If I had to predict shocks, this might be the film to watch.
Extreme cinema
Actually, one of the most exciting inclusions is Alain Giraudie, whose explicit gay thriller The Stranger by the Lake made a sensational impression in 2013. He is now in competition with Rester Vertical, which he says is set in the heart of France, with no more hints.
There was a time when a new work from the French filmmaker Bruno Dumont could mean only one thing: extreme cinema, shocking cinema, cinema that had something of Bresson’s stillness but also violence and menace. However, Dumont has now embraced his funnier side, directing elegant and fascinating comedies. Two years ago, he gave us his epic-length, made-for-TV Lil’ Quinquin — now he has Slack Bay, about grandly wealthy French families of a former age holidaying in northern France and discovering the exotically grisly locals. It features Juliette Binoche, who is showing us what she can do with broad comedy. Should be very interesting.
Jeff Nichols is fast becoming the American filmmaker to whom Cannes gives its benediction: his previous films Take Shelter and Mud have featured here, and now he returns with his new feature Loving, based on a 2012 HBO documentary by Nancy Buirski called The Loving Story, about a notorious 1958 legal case in the US in which an interracial couple Richard and Mildred Loving (played here by Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga) were imprisoned for getting married.
Paul Verhoeven is a director who is assured of a certain tongue-in-cheek praise from French cinephiles, on account of his much-chortled-over Starship Troopers and Showgirls. His new film Elle is in competition, starring the empress of the Cannes red-carpet, Isabelle Huppert, whose presence is mandatory. She plays (rather implausibly) the CEO of a videogame company who is attacked in her home and then seeks revenge. This promises to be a performance with bells and whistles and all guns blazing.
If any filmmaker has been roundly and unexpectedly trashed by the critics in Cannes it is Nicolas Winding Refn, whose Only God Forgives was deafeningly mocked in the press in 2013. I found myself its only defender, and at that time also discovered that diversity of opinion and legitimate disagreement are values that many arts pundits have signed up to in theory only. Now Refn has come to Cannes with a film called The Neon Demon, starring Jena Malone about an aspiring model who comes to Los Angeles and finds herself under attack from, erm, sinister forces. It is a film that reportedly contains vampirism and cannibalism, sounding as if it is inspired by that other Cannes favourite Abel Ferrara. Clearly, bad taste will abound. Bring it on!
The Romanians are back: Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada is in competition, as is Bacalaureat, or Family Photos, by Cristian Mungiu, a former Palme d’Or winner.
Sieranevada is inspired by Aurel Rau’s poem The Agathirsoi, and about a family reunion that is overwhelmed by anxiety.
Sean Penn brings his distinctive and self-conscious machismo back to the Croisette with The Last Face, written by Erin Dignam, with Charlize Theron as the director of an international aid agency in Africa, who fatefully meets a relief medic played by Javier Bardem.
More British interest: Sarah Waters’ much-loved novel Fingersmith is to be brought to the screen, unexpectedly enough, by the great Korean master of the extreme Park Chan-Wook. Titled The Handmaiden, the story is modernised and transposed to Korea.
And talking of extreme cinema — which we keep doing at Cannes — the Philippines’ Brillante Mendoza returns with his Ma’ Rosa. Mendoza is not especially associated with controversial filmmaking but his 2009 film Kinatay is one of the most explicitly violent I have ever seen at Cannes. It never got a UK release.
The festival’s enfant terrible is probably the Canadian Xavier Dolan, a positive veteran of Cannes, with a clutch of features under his belt, and still — incredibly — only 27 years old. His Mommy was a smash hit in Cannes and now he is in competition once more with his It’s Only the End of the World, with Lea Seydoux and Marion Cotillard. Dolan is moving into the big league with these starriest of French names. It might be seen as a further, important test of Dolan’s sinew as a director, had he not already produced so much substantial work.
Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson offers what might be the most attractive pairing of the festival: Adam Driver and the Iranian star Golshifteh Farahani. Driver is the bus driver who writes poetry and comes home to his loving wife (Farahani) who has dreams of her own. This will be one of the hottest tickets of the festival.
Nicole Garcia’s From the Land of the Moon, or Mal De Pierres, is the big offering from French cinema, a literary adaptation starring Marion Cotillard as a free-spirited woman trapped in a loveless marriage, who is attracted to another man. Louis Garrel also stars. Garcia’s work has struck me as a type of French cinema that is lovely looking, tastefully produced — and a little forgettable. But hope springs eternal.
Brazilian director Kleber Mendonca Filho’s Neighbouring Sounds was a hugely admired arthouse-circuit movie and his follow-up Aquarius gets a competition slot. It sounds fascinatingly weird — and it’s about a critic! A 65-year-old retired music writer lives alone, a widow. Her three children have grown up and left the nest. But she has the gift of time travel.
Kristen Stewart fans can look forward to her second appearance on the red carpet (after her turn in Woody Allen’s festival opener Cafe Society) as she appears in the intensely awaited Olivier Assayas movie Personal Shopper: it’s a ghost story set in the Paris underworld. Stewart was a big success in Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria and anticipation is keen for this one.
Germany has a place in competition this year. In Maren Ade’s challengingly offbeat-sounding Toni Erdmann, a father visits his daughter abroad and, believing that she has lost her sense of humour, torments her with jokes of his own. It sounds searingly serious.
As ever, a mouthwatering lineup from Cannes, and, as ever, the sense of deja-vu in the names is an illusion. The real delights will emerge, unexpectedly, from the familiar-looking thicket of big names. As ever, I can’t wait.
