The Cannes film festival is raging away on the Riviera, and, for me, the fomo is strong. I went to Cannes a handful of times in what now seems like ancient pre-Covid history, and always had a blast. Admittedly, much of its appeal comes from the slightly elitist thrill of getting to see a hotly anticipated film – Once Upon a Time in Hollywood or Parasite – long before the rest of the world.
But it’s all the weird ephemera around those premieres that I really miss: the gaudy super yachts parked alongside the Palais des Festivals with man from Del Monte-attired businessmen doing deals on the front deck; the giant billboards that would usually be advertising McDonald’s or H&M instead trumpeting the latest arthouse effort from Jacques Audiard; and, of course, the Marché du Film, the festival’s evil twin, locked away in the basement of the Palais, where distributors try to drum up interest in the likes of Killer Sofa, Tsunambee or Santa Stole Our Dog.
Still, even sat somewhere hundreds miles away and several degrees lower in temperature, it’s hard not to be excited about Cannes. It marks the start of a stretch, running to the autumn festivals (Venice, Toronto, Telluride), that serves as the most exciting part of the film calendar. It’s when we start to hear the first murmurings of buzz around future classics and thrilling new directors. It’s also when you might hear word that the hotly anticipated effort from a beloved auteur is actually a real stinker.
By the time we get to the Oscars next March, opinion around this year’s crop of films will have calcified. Everyone will have decided the presumed frontrunner for the top gong, received wisdom around what is good and bad will have long since set in, and a general fatigue about the whole cycle of festivals and award ceremonies will have set in. But for now, with these films being seen for the first time, everything has freshness and potential.
And on the potential-o-meter this year’s Cannes is rating off the charts. There are returns from hefty film-makers: Audiard, Yorgos Lanthimos, Andrea Arnold, Sean Baker, Paolo Sorrentino, David Cronenberg and Paul Schrader. There are high-risk blockbusters like Mad Max off-shoot Furiosa (the buzz around which seems to be thankfully quite positive) and Kevin Costner’s western Horizon: An American Saga. There are intriguing oddities: Ali Abbasi’s Trump in the 70s biopic The Candidate; Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley in body horror The Substance. There are the international auteurs that the Academy probably won’t go near but who are revered in the world of global cinema: Kirill Serebrennikov, Mohammad Rasoulof, Jia Zhangke. And there are probably half a dozen films on no one’s radar that will break out too.
And looming over the whole thing is Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus/colossal folly. It’s the film The Godfather director (pictured top with the cast) has been trying to get off the ground for decades, the film that he sold a chunk of his winery to fund, the film that he has struggled to sell to execs due to its long running time, elliptical storytelling and general air of being “batshit crazy”. It’s a classic “troubled production” film, as this juicy behind the scenes piece from the Guardian’s Steve Rose lays out. But it’s also the sort of big swing that we should be excited by, and Cannes, with its football terrace levels of applause and booing is the perfect showcase for it. (More troubling in the piece are claims of “old-school behaviour” towards woman by Coppola during filming, though these are denied by the film’s executive co-producer.)
Even if Megalopolis a disaster – and the overnight reviews suggest it may well be (“a bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film” is Peter Bradshaw’s verdict) – that’s part of the fun of somewhere like Cannes. Even for those of us looking on jealously from afar.
