‘The red carpets will be sumptuous!” announced Cannes festival director Pierre Lescure bullishly, seated aside the beaming general delegate Thierry Frémaux. And the mood is pretty bold, now that the festival is returning to a post-Covid normality after cancellation and then disruption in 2020 and 2021.
The festival apparently isn’t giving us the new David Lynch movie that had been feverishly predicted – and the traditional patriotic pining for Brits continues, with none in competition this year. But Cannes is lining up new work from its established alpha auteurs: Claire Denis, David Cronenberg, George Miller, Kelly Reichardt, Park Chan-wook and James Gray, as well as the returns of Palme winners Ruben Östlund, the Dardenne brothers, Cristian Mungiu and Hirokazu Kore-eda.
And there are two huge Hollywood tentpole attractions: Cannes regular Baz Luhrmann is bringing the glitz with his whopping spectacular Elvis, about Elvis Presley, with Austin Butler as the King and Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker. (Interestingly, Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough makes her directorial debut at Cannes with Beast, co-directed with Gina Gammell in the Un Certain Regard sidebar.) Tom Cruise is also coming to Cannes with his sequel Top Gun: Maverick.
The announcement of the official selection is always greeted with scrutiny of its gender balance and global representation – yet with #Cannes2022, the issue always had to be Russia and Ukraine. What are the optics here?
Cannes does have a Russian film in competition: Tchaikovsky’s Wife, directed by Kirill Serebrinnikov – about Tchaikovsky’s tumultuous marital relationship with Antonina Miliukova. (An echo of Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers perhaps?) But Serebrinnikov is a noted anti-Putin dissident, unable to attend Cannes for his last two films because of a travel ban, and now effectively exiled in Germany. Cannes also has a movie in its Special Screening sidebar by the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, whose 2018 film Donbass was a brilliant and disturbing study of Russia’s psychological war of attrition in eastern Ukraine. His new film is The Natural History of Destruction, based on WG Sebald’s 1999 book about the massive allied air bombardment of German civilians during the second world war.
The opener is a zombie comedy from Michel Hazanavicius: Z (Comme Z), or Final Cut – remade from the Michael Frayn-esque Japanese film One Cut of the Dead.
Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave is a Korean mystery thriller featuring Chinese star Tang Wei. James Gray’s Armageddon Time is a boyhood drama set in 1960s New York, with Anthony Hopkins and Jeremy Strong. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker is a drama about the “baby boxes” in which newborn babies in South Korea are abandoned. David Cronenberg’s horror thriller Crimes of the Future (from his own, long-gestating script) promises to be one of the sexiest titles of the festival, with Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart and Viggo Mortensen.
Ali Abbasi, director of the cult film Border, now gives us Holy Spider, the Schraderian story of a holy man who sets out to “cleanse” the Iranian city of Mashhad of immorality. Claire Denis’s The Stars at Noon is based on the novel by Denis Johnson and set in Nicaragua – a return to her keynote theme of empire and colonialism. Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness promises to be another of his mordant satires of the absurdities of human nature – a desert island nightmare for the super-rich with echoes, perhaps, of The Admirable Crichton.
The Dardenne brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre – double Palme d’Or winners – return with Tori and Lokita, about two young people from Africa exiled in Belgium. Another Belgian, Lukas Dhont, known for his trans drama Girl, now comes to the competition for the first time with Close, about the disintegrating friendship of two teenage boys.
Kelly Reichardt is one of the biggest names on the European festival circuit, as the possessor of that prized indie auteur sensibility, and her Showing Up has Michelle Williams as an artist on the verge of a career breakthrough. Romanian director Cristian Mungiu is a fourth-timer at Cannes – little is yet known about his new film here, RMN. Elsewhere, Cannes stalwart Arnaud Desplechin returns with Brother and Sister, showcasing Marion Cotillard and Melvil Poupaud.
Cannes remains tough on Netflix content and loyal to theatrical distribution and the big-screen ethos. But its most notable announcement this year is a partnership with TikTok, platforming exclusive backstage/interview content while diplomatically shifting the tone away from its haughty mandarin dismissal of the digital streaming world.
The Cannes film festival runs from 17 to 28 May.
