FRENCH CONNECTION
The 77th Cannes Film Festival was marked by the arrival of the MeToo movement in France and defined by stories that focused on the experiences of women.
"Carn. Cans. Can." Meryl Streep takes a moment at the podium and gazes out at the formally dressed audience. It is the opening night of the Cannes Film Festival and all 2300 pairs of eyes rest on her. "We Americans think it's fancy to say Carrrn," she deepens her voice, softens her Rs and arches her brow until it frames a knowing look. "But it's wrong. Cannes," she says, now softening the A and crisply exorcising the final three letters. Streep, recipient of over 200 awards for acting and maybe the last woman on Earth who needs to receive another, is in the process of doing just that. Holding her honorary Palme d'Or, presented moments earlier by fellow acting legend Juliette Binoche, she beams. "This prize is unique in the world of cinema, and I am very, very honoured to receive it."
For 77 years, Cannes has endured wars, financial and political crises, labour revolts and a totemic shift in film production and distribution (and that’s just in the last 12 months) to remain unique in the world of cinema. The place best known to some film fans as the destination of Mr Bean’s Holiday remains the global capital of theatrical filmmaking and solemnly reverential toward those who create it. The pride with which the festival takes in tradition is routinely mocked and quietly remarkable.
However, systemic change is afoot. Days before Streep’s speech, the French government launched an inquiry into sexual and gender-based violence in cinema which comes in the wake of charges of rape and sexual assault levelled against acting icon Gérard Depardieu. Over the last year, the introduction of chaperones for minors on film sets and intimacy coordinators – once inconceivable for an industry in thrall to the vision of the “auteur” – have become commonplace. If there is a face of this change it is actress and director Judith Godrèche. Best known for starring in Ridicule and alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in The Man in the Iron Mask, Godrèche was one of the first to bring charges of attempted rape against Harvey Weinstein, a crime she alleges took place during the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. In February this year, she filed charges of rape against directors Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon. All three men have denied her allegations.
Last year, the festival opened with the Johnny Depp-starring French period drama Jeanne Du Barry. This year, the Un Certain Regard sidebar opened with Godrèche's Moi aussi, a short documentary that features personal testimony from hundreds of women in the industry who have experienced sexual abuse. “I am a whistle,” Godrèche said at the premiere. “What we need is a fanfare.”
The festival’s version of a fanfare is the standing ovation. A fixture of every premiere, applause is not an effective measure of quality, but it can be a mark of the film’s first tentative steps into the world, as is booing. The only film at which I heard both was the festival's most expensive and ambitious, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Coppola nodded, bowed and occasionally wept for eight minutes as the Grand Cinema Lumiere expressed its appreciation (though for those keeping score, there was another full minute of applause mid-film in response to a moment of metatextual interactivity that I won’t spoil). The director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now describes his absolutely unhinged $120 million self-funded science fiction opus as “A Roman epic in an imaginary decadent modern America.” In it, Adam Driver plays Cesar, a visionary architect with soaring plans for New Rome, a dystopian analogue of New York City. Cesar has fallen in love with Nathalie Emmanuel’s Julia, daughter of the city’s corrupt mayor, Franklyn Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito. Cicero doesn’t want to lose the world over which he rules, and plots Cesar’s downfall. While one dreams and the other schemes, Aubrey Plaza’s ambitious journalist Wow Platinum begins a relationship with Cesar’s billionaire uncle Hamilton Crassus III, played by Jon Voight, and Shia LeBeouf’s cross-dressing spy Clodio stalks marbled halls, hissing lines like, “Revenge tastes best while wearing a dress.” Even Coppola, who admitted to rewriting the script 300 times over 40 years, professed not to fully comprehend his creation. As I heard one critic say, while queuing for Andrea Arnold’s Bird the following morning, “Anyone who claims to understand it after a single viewing is lying, and no-one will ever watch it twice.”
Bird is a much easier film to love. Arnold’s gritty, vibrant ode to girlhood follows 12-year-old Bailey, who lives in a liberally graffitied London housing estate with her equally liberally tattooed father, Bug, played by Saltburn’s Barry Keoghan. Bug is breeding a toad that sweats a hallucinogenic slime he is hoping to sell to fund his imminent wedding. Outside, London is all housing estates, green fields, and free roaming children and animals. While on one of her frequent ventures, Bailey meets the elfin Bird, played by Franz Ragowski, who is trying to find his parents. Arnold's film is warm, frequently hilarious, often wincingly violent and tinged with a magical realism that proved divisive among critics.
Coming of age films, such as those in which Godrèche was cast when she was a child, have been a fixture at Cannes since its inception. The difference today is that they tend to be written and directed by women. Alongside Bird, this year’s selection features Agathe Riedinger’s Wild Diamond, a French film about an influencer and hustler whose life is upended when she successfully auditions to be on a reality television show and India Donaldson’s Sundance triumph Good One, a minimalist, slow-burn story about a hiking trip taken by a father and daughter and a reminder that the 90-minute movie is not dead.
Emilia Perez is Jacques Audiard’s musical about the head of a Mexican drug cartel who hires a lawyer to help fake his death and arrange gender-affirming surgery for his transition. Bought by Netflix, Winner of both the Jury Prize and the Best Actress award for its female leads Selena Gomez, Zoe Soldana, Adriana Paz and trans Argentinean actor Karla Sofía Gascón, Audiard’s audacious film is a compulsively engaging character study overflowing with brio. If the synth-heavy songs like La Vaginoplastia don’t linger in the memory, their context and performance certainly does.
Also not leaving the memory any time soon is The Substance. Coralie Fargeat’s Best Screenplay-winning feminist body horror charts the psychological and physical disintegration of Demi Moore's fitness celebrity, Elizabeth Sparkle, who engages the services of a mysterious company that allows her to create “the best version of herself”. This version is played by the younger Margot Qualley, who emerges through a gaping wound in Moore’s back, the first of many exercises in grotesque excess, all in service of Fargeat's commentary about beauty, youth, women’s bodies and the pressures of the entertainment industry, inspired by Moore’s memoir, Inside Out.
Only one film at Cannes this year features a dehydrated and screaming Nicholas Cage in the foam of a West Australian beach, forcing a dead rat into the mouth of a surfer called Pitbull, and it wasn’t Yorgos Lanthimos's follow up to Poor Things, the darkly funny Kinds of Kindness. Lorcan Finnegan’s equally entertaining The Surfer, the sole Australian contribution to this year's program, sees Cage returning from thirty years in California to the town he grew up in with dreams of buying his father’s house and taking his son for a surf. Instead, he encounters violent localism from a surf posse headed by Julian McMahon’s Scally: “Don’t live here? Don’t surf here.” Inspired by Australian new wave cinema, The Surfer is buoyed by Finnegan’s potent visual style and Cage’s brand of sympathetic intensity which was on powerful form at the film’s premiere as his cries of “mangez le rat!” ("eat the rat!") from the stage of the Grand Theatre Lumière echoed throughout its standing ovation.
The festival’s most consistently funny and original title was Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language. In Rankin's world, a wintry Canada has adopted Farsi as its official language. Two schoolgirls find a 500 Rial banknote frozen in a block of ice with which they hope to buy a pair of glasses for their friend after they were taken by an errant turkey. Rankin harnesses the dry wit of Garrison Keillor, the precise framing of Wes Anderson and the colour palette of an Soviet industrial estate to create a film full of sweetly weird situations and sight gags.
Another out of competition highlight was the 67-minute documentary La Belle de Gaza. Director Yolande Zauberman hears of a trans woman who walked from Gaza to join Tel Aviv's queer community. In the backstreets of the Israeli capital, Zauberman earns the trust of a tightknit group who share their stories and talk about their bodies, religion, sex work and families (some of whom will kill them if they return to their home countries) as Zauberman’s camera watches them pray, sing, dance and hustle. In 2024, La Belle de Gaza feels like a minor miracle.
Sean Baker's Anora was another story of sex work. One of the few American films in competition, Baker's film was purchased by Neon, the distributor responsible for the last four Palme d’Or winners. Anora moves with the riotous energy of a 1930s screwball comedy as it trails the romance between Mikey Madison’s Anora and Mark Eydelshteyn’s Ivan, the son of a Russian oligarch. With dreams of escaping his family and becoming American, Ivan pays Anora $15,000 to be his “very horny girlfriend” for a week, during which they party in Las Vegas, and marry. With echoes of Martin Scorsese's After Hours and the Safdie brothers' unrelenting Uncut Gems, Anora proved irrepressible to the festival's judges – a group led by Barbie director Greta Gerwig that included Lily Gladstone, Hirokazu Kore-eda and Eva Green – who awarded it the festivals' top prize, the Palme d'Or.
Another film likely to recur in conversations throughout 2024 is The Apprentice. Among all the possible subjects for that most leaden of genres, the biopic, Donald Trump is likely to be among the least desired. Yet, Iranian director Ali Abbasi has crafted a sharp crime saga that focuses on the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, played by Succession’s Jeremy Strong, and his mentorship of Sebastian Stan’s aspiring real estate mogul from the early 1970s until the mid 1980s. Already the subject of a lawsuit from both Trump and a financier who thought The Apprentice would be more flattering to the former president, Abbasi's character-driven approach allows the many criminal and unethical acts portrayed to speak for themselves, though whether people want to spend time with these characters is another matter.
Last month, another Iranian director, Mohammad Rasoulof, was sentenced to public flogging and eight years imprisonment for making films that Iran's revolutionary court deemed “examples of collusion with the intention of committing a crime against the country’s security.” Mid-way into the festival, word spread that Rasoulof had defied authorities to flee Iran and attend Cannes. As Rasoulof walked the red carpet, up the stairs and into the film's premiere, to applause that felt celebratory, he held photos of two of his film’s lead actors, currently detained for their involvement in the film. Filmed in secret, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a domestic thriller in which Misagh Zare plays Iman, a newly appointed investigator to the revolutionary court. The promise of a new house and status is undone when loses his gun, a crime that could see him jailed. Iman accuses his law-abiding wife and two teenage daughters, participants in "Women. Life. Freedom" protest movement, of stealing it. As pressure grows both inside and outside the family's cramped apartment, Rasoulof intercuts real social media footage of police brutality, making for a powerful film that topped critics polls and offered a searing insight into the impossibility of being a "good" citizen.
"It is so much quieter this year," an Uber driver told me, toward the end of the festival. "It's no good." Due to last year's screenwriters and actors' strikes, this year's festival featured fewer American films. Instead, more focus has been put on female-fronted events and the festival's unofficial awards. The competition for the Queer Palm – awarded to the film that best deals with LGBT+, feminist characters and topics or challenging gender norms – was fierce, with the award going to Three Kilometers to the End of the World, Emanuel Parvu’s claustrophobic account of virulent homophobia in a small Romanian town. Last year the Palm Dog, the award given to the best canine performance in a film, went to Messi, the border collie from Anatomy of a Fall. This year a griffon mix called Kodi, star of the lightweight legal comedy Dog on Trial, a film about the judging of a mordacious dog, took home the prize.
“It was an embarrassment of riches this year in terms of cinema,” said Gerwig during the closing ceremony. “We really led with our hearts for everything we watched.” As the films make their way into Australian cinemas and onto streaming platforms over the next 12 months, cinephiles can be sure of finding films to love.
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