Cannes 2018 verdict: sombre brilliance wins day despite Von Trier’s unwelcome return

Brilliant … a still from Burning by Lee Chang-dong. Photograph: Cannes Film Festival

This year’s Cannes festival snapped into shape in its second week. There had been rumours that this was because a few sexy contenders from Netflix had been scheduled close to the first weekend, which had to be pulled because of the streaming giant’s dispute with Cannes, and so some rather more sombre world-cinema offerings had to be slotted in, and the order shuffled.

In the first week, however, Pawel Pawłikowski’s Cold War was a stunning period drama, set in 1950s Poland, an utterly absorbing tragedy-romance in which the director takes incidental aim at the chauvinism and racism of his homeland – very relevant in 2018. The second half then offered a couple of sensationally good films. The first was Matteo Garrone’s bizarre Dogman, a drama, based on a true story, about a small-time gangster and his cringing bully-victim, a dog-groomer. The second was Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, based on the Haruki Murakami short story, an ambiguous mystery thriller about male obsession. Connoisseur taste in Cannes is favouring the undoubtedly brilliant Burning, though I was even more impressed with Dogman.

Watch the trailer for Dogman

As the festival comes to a close, we have to ask whether the issue of Time’s Up has made any impact. Perhaps it is also worth remembering the residue of an earlier campaign; after #OscarsSoWhite, some were wondering whether #CannesSoWhite might have any traction. Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman raucously attacked the issue of racism and Trumpism.

But in a larger sense, that still appears to be a campaign for another day or year. This year, before the screening of Eva Husson’s passionate, underrated film Girls of the Sun, the jury president Cate Blanchett led a spectacular #MeToo protest display of 82 women on to the red carpet – producers, stars, writers, directors – to symbolise the fact that only 82 of the competition films in the festival’s 71-year history were directed by women, as opposed to 1,645 directed by men. This year there were three women directors in competition. The ratio has remained pretty much constant.

Watch the trailer for Happy As Lazzaro

My favourite film in competition this year, which looks bound for the Palme d’Or, is Alice Rohrbacher’s sublime and mysterious magic-realist fable Happy as Lazzaro, a parable of how the rural population of Italy has been exploited and betrayed.

Nothing is more tiresome than people airily dismissing positive discrimination, smirking at the very idea while assenting to the rigid gender quotas of “best actor”, “best actress” etc. In any case, Time’s Up campaigners are not asking for positive discrimination but an end to deep-seated, subconscious negative discrimination.

This will take time. This year, the festival welcomed, with an out-of-competition slot, that talented but cynical serial prankster Lars von Trier, and his giggling gorefest The House That Jack Built, which trolled his critics with misogynist slayings and deadpan Nazi references. This film could have appeared in Cannes at any time in the past 20 years.

There was no obvious sign of a change in the culture there, nor in David Robert Mitchell’s deeply disappointing LA mystery noir Under the Silver Lake. (Like The House That Jack Built, this was a film that slavered over the naked body of Riley Keough, an excellent performer who was badly and boringly directed in both films.)

Two films about the poor and the dispossessed, AB Shawky’s Yomeddine and Nadine Labaki’s Capurnaum, though they had their qualities, were rather quaint fantasies from the bien-pensant international arthouse about how poor people behave. Christophe Honoré’s Sorry Angel was a movie with gay themes that was well liked. I found it complacent, mannered and passionless.

Watch the trailer for Shoplifting

There were tremendous films from two festival big-hitters. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters was a fascinating deconstruction of the idea of family and Jia Zhang-ke’s Ash Is Purest White was an absolutely intriguing and novelistic story of a young woman’s Dostoevskian prison sacrifice for her uncaring gangster boyfriend.

And the biggest hitter of all was here, the silverback gorilla of the Cannes jungle, Jean-Luc Godard. He was back, at the age of 87, with his essay film The Image Book – a gripping piece of conceptual art with the body language of a horror movie. How extraordinary – how moving, in fact – that this key figure in the history of film-making is still with us, making movies.

So here are my awards predictions. There is a convention that the jury does not “double up” with prizes: that is, give more than one prize to the same film. That rule was broken last year and I have broken it here. I have also offered imaginary prizes in categories that the Cannes jury does not address: cinematography, production design, music, best supporting male and female actor.