It was with that distinctively French manner of casual, even shrugging, hyperbole that the Cannes film festival director, Thierry Frémaux, prefaced the announcement of this year’s lineup by promising “a great renewal of a generation”. He sounded, as is his wont, unfussed about this and, in turn, those listening at the press conference could understandably have dismissed the boast as a hollow one.
Isn’t Cannes more or less the same every year, after all? The roster of high-minded films from brand-name auteurs mixed in with the annual concession to blockbuster celebrity-bait takes a similar shape from one edition to the next.
The parties and premiere photos are all but interchangeable across the years. The controversies, too, are more or less fixed in place: every year you can count on headlines about gratuitous provocations on screen, press conference gaffes, booing in the aisles, the paucity of female film-makers in the programme, and the sartorial sexism of the rigid red-carpet dress code. Journalists covering the festivals are constantly checking they haven’t reused last year’s bon mots; a four-year cycle, at least, seems more or less reasonable.
Yet once Frémaux had unveiled his 2018 selection, eyebrows remained largely raised. European Twitter wags gleefully declared a “Frémauxcalypse”; many Americans were left bewildered. “Seriously?” shrieked the reactionary Hollywood blogger Jeffrey Wells, swiftly declaring the lineup, sight unseen, the worst in memory. “I get the overwhelming feeling we’re being punished for something,” half-joked New York Magazine’s Emily Yoshida.
Over in London, Mike Leigh, a former Palme d’Or winner, might have wondered something similar. His forthcoming historical epic, Peterloo, widely seen as a sure bet for the Cannes competition, had been passed over – the most surprising of several high-profile auteur omissions whose films had been seen and assessed by Frémaux’s selection committee. Italy’s Paolo Sorrentino, whose last six films all competed at Cannes, was frozen out with his Berlusconi biopic, Loro. Japan’s Naomi Kawase, a mainstay of the festival since winning the Camera d’Or for her 1997 debut, Suzaku, was left off the list too, despite the Cannes-friendly presence of Juliette Binoche in her latest, Vision. Meanwhile, Claire Denis, a critics’ darling who somehow hasn’t been in competition at Cannes since 1988, was widely expected to break the hex with High Life, a sci-fi film starring Robert Pattinson. Frémaux had other ideas.
The bloodbath was compounded by the immediate fallout from the festival’s much-publicised dispute with the content streaming monolith Netflix, the distributor behind several big-name attractions that had been expected to premiere on the Croisette, including Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, Paul Greengrass’s Norway and the eagerly awaited completion of Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind, which had been decades in the making.
Netflix famously opts to release its films immediately online. French exhibitors, resistant to this new model, require a window of cinema exclusivity. Failure to broker a compromise between the two resulted in Netflix withdrawing its films altogether. Bar an unlikely softening in stance on either side, last year’s Netflix-backed competition entries Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories will remain anomalies for the foreseeable future.
In place of the predicted big shots are several names that have casual observers scratching their heads: Eva Husson (Girls of the Sun), Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Asako I & II), Kirill Serebrennikov (Leto), Sergei Dvortsevoy (My Little One), Nadine Labaki (Capernaum) and Abu Bakr Shawky (Yomeddine).
Apart from the Egyptian newcomer Shawky – granted a competition slot for his debut feature, an irregular occurrence at Cannes – these directors are not unknown quantities to critics and industry folk schooled in the contemporary festival circuit. But they are the sort of up-and-comers, mostly hailed for previous, promising but modestly exposed works, that Cannes tends to reserve for its secondary Un Certain Regard section: a lively strand dominated by rising stars, mixed in with the occasional competition regular serving some sort of demotion sentence. This year’s relegated major is Ukraine’s Sergei Loznitsa, whose impressive but grindingly difficult A Gentle Creature was in competition last year, and proved sufficiently alienating to earn his latest, Donbass, an opportunity as this year’s Un Certain Regard opener.
While the odd talented upstart is occasionally fast-tracked to competition status – Andrea Arnold made the grade with her 2006 debut Red Road, and has competed twice since – the festival tends to take a cautious, conservative approach to programming its top tier. An old boys’ club (with emphasis, regrettably, on “boys”) predominates: veterans like Michael Haneke, Ken Loach, Pedro Almodóvar and the Dardenne brothers make the cut for almost every film they make, major or minor, competing principally against others who have been to the rodeo before.
This year’s competition lineup isn’t a complete rejection of the old guard, with contenders including the former Palme d’Or winner Nuri Bilge Ceylan (The Wild Pear Tree), the 87-year-old New Wave luminary Jean-Luc Godard (The Image Book), and revived American firebrand Spike Lee – though referring to Lee, returning on agitated form with the timely racial drama BlacKkKlansman, as any kind of elder statesman suggests the festival is experiencing some form of generational shift. But of the 21 films in the lineup, 10 come from Cannes newcomers – a far higher number than in other years under Frémaux’s rule and an exciting indication that Cannes is ready to refresh its auteur pantheon.
Not all the newcomers are, well, newcomers: fresh from his Oscar win for Ida, Pawel Pawlikowski makes his Cannes debut with the similarly-styled Cold War, while Jafar Panahi, an embattled political prisoner in his native Iran, is seeking to complete the European festival triple crown (after winning Berlin’s Golden Bear and Venice’s Golden Lion) with his first competition entry, Three Faces. Hamaguchi is comparatively new on the block, but his last film, the five-hour female friendship saga Happy Hour, was an international festival hit minted at the more left-field Locarno showcase. Such selections are an encouraging sign that Cannes selectors, rather than focusing merely on the festival’s own hierarchy, are wising up and catching on to success stories outside their realm.
There are still blind spots here, of course. Only three female directors in a lineup of 21 films remains an embarrassing statistic, one not masked by a female majority on this year’s Cate Blanchett-headed jury. One hopes that Blanchett, never shy about addressing gender imbalance in the industry, gives Frémaux some pointed feedback.
And in a festival touted as the pre-eminent showcase of world cinema, it’s always galling when entire continents go awol from the lineup: the flip side of Asian cinema pleasingly having its best Cannes showing in years is the much-protested absence of South America. (Hopes had been high for the Colombian sensation Ciro Guerra to make the grade for his eagerly awaited Embrace of the Serpent follow-up, Birds of Passage; he had to settle instead for opening the independently programmed directors’ fortnight strand.)
It’s the unusually low profile of that continent’s northern neighbour in this year’s competition, however, that remains its biggest, most bracing surprise. Lee apart, the only sprinkling of Hollywood stardust comes with David Robert Mitchell’s noir Under the Silver Lake, starring Andrew Garfield. He is the kind of ascending indie director who wouldn’t usually be admitted to the Cannes golden circle so early.
Yet there he is, in a slot that former competition bad boy Lars von Trier would dearly love to have. Seven years after earning persona non grata status with his infamous “I understand Hitler” blunder, the Dane has been only half-welcomed back, landing an out-of-competition spot for his serial-killer drama, The House That Jack Built, that smacks of continuing rebuke. Pushed to the fringes in favour of fresher, less offending names, he could well feel piqued enough to say something similarly crass at his comeback press conference. Not everything at this year’s gratifyingly unpredictable festival has to change, after all.
Bonjour to the new wave
David Robert Mitchell Under the Silver Lake
The American director, 44,made his debut in 2010 with The Myth of the American Sleepover, a wistful coming-of-age film that played in Cannes’ low-profile critics’ week section, before sharpening his teeth on the rattling indie horror film, It Follows (2014). Now, with his gonzo 140-minute, Under the Silver Lake, he makes an ambitious play for Lynchian status.
Eva Husson Girls of the Sun
One of the wildest cards in this lineup, Husson, 41, split the critics with her stylish, sexually explicit teenage dream Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story) in 2015 and now moves on to very different terrain with Girls of the Sun, a study of a Kurdish female battalion reclaiming their its town from extremists.
Abu Bakr Shawky Yomeddine
Snagging a Cannes competition slot for your directorial debut remains a rare feat, so critics will be curious to find out what the selection committee saw in Shawky, an Egyptian-Austrian film-maker by way of New York University film school, and his comedy, Yomeddine, about two lepers leaving their colony in search of their estranged families.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi Asako I & II
The Japanese writer-director, 39, has made a number of features since his 2007 debut, but found international acclaim in 2015 with his five-hour intimate epic, Happy Hour, a bittersweet study of female friendship that won awards at Locarno. His follow-up, the romantic drama Asako I & II, runs a mere two hours.
Yann Gonzalez Knife + Heart
A late addition to the line-up, Gonzalez – a Frenchman and a former member of the dreamy electronica band M83 – made a splashy debut in 2013 with his queer erotic drama, You and the Night, and appears to be bringing similarly neon-hued energy to the competition with his second film, Knife + Heart, a thriller starring Vanessa Paradis.
