Cannes, Do!

The world’s biggest, oddest film festival is back. Sort of.

The Weekend Wag returns to the Riviera. And It’s ever so nice.

When we last met the Cannes Film Festival, it was 2019 (approximately one million years ago) and life and art sparkled like sunshine on a sapphire Med. The winner of the coveted Palm d’Or was Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, which went on to grab the Best Picture Oscar and uncannily forecast the claustrophobia of the Great Pandemic. The fête’s closing number, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in America, was greeted with one of those rapturous, endless, standing ovations that make Cannes…Cannes. Once Upon a Time turned out to be a genuine smash, and while some may quibble with the artistic choice of immolating Manson Family capo Susan Atkins (a.k.a. Sadie Mae Glutz!) with a flame thrower, it is, in this correspondent’s humble view, Tarantino’s cathartic masterpiece, and a surprisingly sweet valentine to Hollywood.

All of which is to say that 2019 was an exceptionally good year for Cannes, an event not always on the euro when it comes to popular taste. Surely you recall past Palme d’Or winners Shoplifters, Dheepan, and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives? Non? Perhaps you were watching Avengers movies with all the other philistines, which is no great sin. Let us concede that official competition is a small part of a sprawling, terribly sweaty, global marketplace for films. But why do Americans, among others, punch a hole in the ozone layer to see movies they could easily watch at home? Honestly, to catch Natalie Portman dipping her toes into a bathtub warm sea, to see the cast of The Expendables driving down the Boulevard de la Croisette in a tank, and to worship a Hindenburg-sized Kung Fu Panda floating above the spires of the Carlton Hotel (where, incidentally, I once witnessed a $137 million jewel heist). These are memories that can’t be made on a laptop, but they just might not be core to the modern business of screened entertainment.

So, what happened to Cannes in 2020? Pouf! Lesser festivals haplessly tried to create virtual approximations of themselves, but the fête on la Croisette was called off. This (forgive us) was canny. Stick-in-the-muds can bicker about whether a Cannes Film Festival makes sense, but everybody agrees that a Cannes Film Festival on Microsoft Teams would be horrendous. One cannot have Cannes without a schlep to the Hôtel du Cap at an ungodly hour, a bureaucrat whose métier is to deny you the right color lanyard, and an 11-hour wait for médiocre soupe de poisson. Zoom, as far as we know, does not feature oligarchs in phallocentric white jeans, dancing on Nikki Beach table tops with porn queens from the former Soviet bloc, or Gulf potentates idling outside the Hôtel Martinez in neon-colored Lamborghinis. And let us not forget the joy of being sprung upon by a sidewalk mime! We are speaking of sensual pleasures here, which can only be had in the South Beach of La Belle France.

Now Cannes is back in the flesh, complete with its legendary red carpet on the steps of the hulking Palais des Festivals et des Congrés. Sort of. This year is light on throngs and pulchritude, because, well, obviously. There are fewer Americans, limits on audiences, a sort-of mask strategy, a strict Covid testing regime, and much less Euro-Disco-by-the-Shore. Still, black-tie premieres are reliably stacking up in shifts outside the Palais. Those who have braved Provence between the curtain-drop on one global crisis, and the looming premiere of its sequel (with the billboard-worthy name of Delta Variant) must be hoping that the business can just go back to its old step-and-repeat.

This seems delusional, but delusion, mixed with a passable rosé, is the official cocktail of the South of France. This year’s festival opened with Annette, from French director Leos Carax, which is, maybe, a musical about a standup comic and opera star who have a marionette for a baby. In other words, it is a perfect Cannes movie, in that it is demented, divisive, and de trop. Every day people may never lay eyes on Annette, but many of them will still know that it features Adam Driver serenading Marion Cotillard’s vagina (hence all those silly jokes about Driver lighting a cigarette during the standing ovation). On its heels comes Show Girls maestro Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, which might be called nunsploitation — a 17th-century cloistered sister has visions, and lots of lesbian sex, in a convent run by Mother Superior Charlotte Rampling. Whether you like these films or not, the chatter around them recalls the quaint scandales of another era, when cinema was the cultural main stage and audiences were titillated by Emmanuelle’s knickers.

Andrea Arnold’s documentary Cow, an empathetic documentary about the lives of dairy cattle in England, may wind up getting more buzz than those flashy numbers. There’s also Florida Project director Sean Baker’s follow-up, Red Rocket, about a porn star who returns to his small Texas town, and Thai director Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, a holdover from 2020, starring Tilda Swinton as a woman whose rare neurological disorder gives her a new understanding of reality. Another film originally scheduled for last year’s festival, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, is surely its most anticipated premiere.

Does any of this really matter? I should like to think it does, if only because show business really ought to be showy, and a bit mad. The first time I went to Cannes, I was invited to the premiere of Two Lovers, a movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Joaquin Phoenix as working-class Brooklynites (!), and what I remember, wincingly, is being the very last person to hit the red carpet after the stars. The flashbulbs, which had been popping like crazy only seconds before when G.P. ascended the steps of Palais, suddenly went dead as I, an irrelevant little pisher in a tuxedo, stumbled heavenward alone in chilly silence. A better lesson about the pecking order I could not have had. Cannes has taught me all sorts of things. Such as, where to eat, and what to wear, and that show people are actually the show. And, that there is a sprawling Other-Cannes, a Cannes of countless hustlers in warrens of stalls under the Palais, hawking Thai martial arts movies and Serbian vampire flicks and Bollywood romances. I love it in a very French way, which is irrationally and to occasional violence.

Since its birth in 1946, when the reels of Hitchcock’s Notorious were shown in the wrong order, Cary Grant arrived by yacht, and Anna Magnani was starring in Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, Cannes has been a glitz vehicle extraordinaire. Toronto may have commercial relevance, Sundance may be more of a talent pipeline, and Telluride may matter more to real insiders. But they don’t have the backdrop from To Catch a Thief! World War II had barely ended when Cannes began, and its history is intertwined with the rebuilding of the West, that great project of cooperation between Britain, America, and France. Like France, Cannes always goes its own way, with its bureaucracy, its byzantine rules for what can wear on the red carpet, and its total disinterest in whether any of it would play in Silicon Valley or HBS. What are any of the rules for? Really just to annoy all those anglophone interlopers.

Cannes, which has blocked efforts by Netflix to enter films into competition, will be the last place on earth to let romantic notions of cinema go. It’s pure Gallic stubbornness—this love of old-fashioned movies with a capital M, this rejection of newfangled logic in favor of something closer to art—even if it is bad art. To which one must give one of those standing ovations. It’s absurd. But then, so are the movies.