Mass appeal: Report from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival

Most of the years I have attended the Cannes Film Festival, it has felt futile to try to explain in just a few words – besides “great” or “amazing” – what it was like, how it felt, or what it was doing. It seemed impossible to imagine director Thierry Frémaux sitting in a boardroom full of ad executives, listening to Don Draper-types as they tried to come up with catchy and catch-all slogans for the festival. If there was a general idea of cinema that the event sought to promote – anything more specific than “arthouse” – then it didn’t show in the final result. The festival had, and still has, a strong attachment to film history and the “canon”, especially in the Official Competition, but it is also where many fresh voices are first heard. For every commercial film and future Oscar contender that premieres in Cannes, you will find several smaller and more daring propositions, with very different aspirations. One of the few things that can be said with relative certainty about the Cannes Film Festival is that it doesn’t program enough films made by women. This may reflect the fact that fewer films are directed by women in general. In the US, women accounted for 22% of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the 250 top grossing films in 2023 according to The Celluloid Ceiling report.¹ Meanwhile in France, 33.2% of the FIF films approved for support by the National Cinema Centre in 2022 were directed or co-directed by women.² The Cannes Film Festival website states that the selection committee for the Official Selection “pays close attention to the percentage of female-directed films selected so that this is broadly consistent with the percentage of female-directed films submitted to the official selection:” in 2023, 29% of feature films submitted and 28% of feature films selected were directed by women.³  Yet it seems obvious that women will have an easier time getting films made if there is greater demand for them, and festivals can play an important part in creating that demand. Several now manage to compile programs that do not skew so male: for example, 43 of the 91 features in the 2024 Sundance Film Festival line-up included one or more directors who identify as women, which amounted to about 47%.⁴

This somewhat chaotic irreducibility is precisely what makes the iconic annual gathering, at its best, so valuable. If there is an organising principle at all, it is usually the honourable desire to prioritise filmmakers’ visions, shining a spotlight on individual voices even if they do not necessarily complement one another in the same program. There is even a sense, keenly felt while experiencing the festival, that its various sections are at war with each other – although we know that they sometimes fight over certain titles, they often appear to represent different ideas of what cinema is and what it’s for. Rumours of tensions between the heads and programmers of parallel programs are a staple of every edition. Perhaps a degree of disagreement is to be desired at a festival (when it doesn’t devolve into unhealthy and disrespectful behaviour – an exposé of Thierry Frémaux alleged mismanagement, set to drop during the festival, appeared in early June in Mediapart).⁵ Rather than a harmonious palette, Cannes’ programming is often jagged and full of contradictions; it is on us attendees to carve our own path through it. 

Add to this a diversity of filmmakers, critics, producers, and red carpet walkers, all in the city for very different reasons, and Cannes reveals itself as a unique Rashomon-like experience of conflicting interpretations and memories. Consensus is never guaranteed. When it does occur – like when Maren Ade’s miraculous Toni Erdmann premiered in 2016 – it feels all the rarer and more magical. 

Filmmakers will continue to make wonderful films no matter what direction the Cannes Film Festival decides to follow. But this year’s edition suggested a worrying turn away from the fruitful multiplicity of voices and experiences that has made it such an inspiring place in the past.

The Substance

If I were to create a word cloud representing this 2024 edition, “consensus” would be the biggest word on the page. Although opinion on individual films varied slightly, almost everyone agreed that the general level of quality was high, with a lot of fine films, aptly realised and interesting to talk about. Only a handful proved truly polarising: Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is virulently hated by many and adored by legions of others; some are dazzled and awed by Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, others are bewildered, finding it an obviously idiotic proposition; and although there are those who call Francis Ford Coppola’s epic self-financed folly Megalopolis a flawed masterpiece or an unmitigated disaster, most simply find it “interesting”. 

The question of why this year’s program turned out to be so perfectly adequate cannot be answered based on the films alone. Or at least, not yet: perhaps the selections in Venice and Toronto will reveal gems that the Cannes selectors chose to ignore. It is just as likely, however, that fewer truly special films – such as Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, favoured for the Palme d’Or as soon as it premiered, before losing to Sean Baker’s accomplished and intricate Anora – were made over the past year or so. But no matter what gems emerge on the scene in the remainder of the year, a focus on competence over bold experimentation and risk-taking on the part of the Cannes selectors is undeniable. 

What all but confirmed this pivot was the overwhelming presence, alongside the usual array of arthouse darlings, of internationally renowned directors much more familiar with mainstream success than your average Apitchatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul. Big titles of this kind have been present at most recent editions: Solo: A Star Wars Story (Ron Howard) lit up the Croisette in 2018 with a dazzling fireworks display; fighter jets flew overhead in 2022 for the premiere of Top Gun: Maverick (​​Joseph Kosinski); Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (James Mangold) was the occasion for an Honorary Palme d’Or for Harrison Ford last year. In those years, several of my American colleagues had flown across the Atlantic to review these and only these (most of them snuck in a few non-English-language, “foreign” films in their busy schedules regardless… but not all!) The whiplash between what the festival generally was about, and these shameless displays of affection for American blockbusters, was shocking as well as worrying. But if rolling out the red carpet for a few films that were guaranteed to make millions of dollars at the box office the following week was necessary to keep the Cannes Film Festival afloat, then I was happy to take the evening off on the day of these big premieres, or to flee the crowds and watch something more obscure. It was possible – and, to my mind, recommended – to avoid these tentpoles.

Not so this year – but you’d be forgiven for not noticing. One of the most “IMDb top 100”-heavy in years, the 2024 selection saw the number of mainstream names reach such a critical mass that they were not whiplash-inducing aberrations anymore: they almost became the norm. Frémaux and his team made the most of a peculiar moment in cinema when many titans who first made their mark in the fruitful 1970s are now signing their late-style masterpieces and potential swan songs. Cannes welcomed with open arms those renowned directors now in their twilight years – filmmakers that not even the most discerning of cinephiles, usually repulsed by cultural homogenisation, could possibly resist. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Who could say no to Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga from 79-year-old George Miller after his masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road unified fans of both Méliès and motorised vehicles back in 2015? The film turned out to be a disappointment, swapping the thrilling primal simplicity of Fury Road for a simply banal trauma plot. Paul Schrader, 77, has been straddling the border between the mainstream and the arthouse for a while, working with big name actors who could at least hypothetically draw a crowd to his explorations of guilt and the limits of the male psyche. Jacob Elordi of Euphoria (2019-), Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023) and The Kissing Booth (Vince Marcello, 2018) fame could attract some viewers to Oh, Canada, one of Schrader’s least gory creations, but also one of his most psychologically violent. Elordi is too alert and expressive an actor to convincingly play the young and foolish version of Richard Gere’s bitter old documentary filmmaker, a draft-dodger who rode the coattails of an accidental early success and betrayed those who loved him without looking back… until now. Though clunky in parts, Oh, Canada’s messy quality seems the result of a genuine attempt at confronting some very personal demons for Schrader. It was catnip for me, but may put off fans of the Schrader-penned Taxi Driver (1976): while the two films share an emphasis on confessional catharsis, this new effort directly challenges the idea of redemption, and the ugliness of its protagonist is a lot less appealing than Travis Bickle’s. The latter’s final shootout may be a self-serving attempt at playing the hero, but at least his heart was in the right place. 

Eighty-five-year-old Francis Ford Coppola, meanwhile, is still known in most circles as the director of The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979), despite decades of diminishing returns. But who could resist the romantic backstory of Megalopolis? A passion project that was decades in the making, a money pit without equal, and a work of endearingly extreme ambition, it simply had to be seen; until recent announcements of theatrical distribution deals in the UK and the US, its Cannes premiere and repeat screenings seemed like they would be the only chances to ever catch it. After a recent rewatch of Apocalypse Now, I was chastised by some friends for calling Coppola’s direction “a little goofy”, but this adolescent earnestness is precisely what carries Megalopolis to the finish line and into moments of real pathos, even as everything else about the film threatens to collapse into eye-wateringly ugly nonsense. 

No festival director in their right mind would have passed up the opportunity to host these living legends. Would they? Frémaux and his team took it a step further by inviting Star Wars director George Lucas to receive an Honorary Palme d’Or, thus bringing back together three icons of 1970s and 1980s American cinema. Schrader himself pointed this out by sharing on his infamous Facebook profile a picture from 1985 featuring the three of them together from when Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters premiered at Cannes (Schrader directed and Coppola and Lucas executive produced).⁶ 

There is no doubt that most cinephiles love these guys; for many of us, their films were our gateway into a lifelong passion for cinema. But when does a respect for our elders and their enduring talents turn into a more unproductive kind of starry-eyed nostalgia? Many have deplored the way a lesser Schrader or a catastrophic Coppola may have taken a competition slot from a promising new voice. The question, then, is about the perceived goal of the Cannes Film Festival, its remit and vision. Is Cannes the place to premiere Kevin Costner’s violently average, deeply uninteresting three-hour-long western Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1? Where is the line between the film festival as a selective spotlight, pushing the form to ever greater heights, and the festival as a reassuringly familiar buffet?

Although some of those films were tortured and not exactly popcorn-sellers, the general impression was nevertheless one of basic dad nostalgia, a spirit of benevolence towards those legends of American cinema that surely no one in France (or anywhere else) would be above admitting that they like. This feels like a shift, or a capitulation. In a world where it is getting harder all the time to resist the English-language cultural monolith (and Miller does belong to that group), Cannes once felt like a proud defender of European or “world” cinema. Talking in May about Competition films’ chances at the Oscars the next year would have raised eyebrows just a few years ago. Now, the duration of standing ovations in the Palais des Festivals is in all the headlines of trade magazines as an indicator of Academy Award chances. 

Kinds of Kindness

But everything is getting more American – in the sense of “more accessible to the mainstream” – not just Cannes. Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness, his fifth feature film in English, seems to adopt that “universal” language mostly to give his work greater visibility: the target of his critique is humanity at large. The Substance, like Fargeat’s debut feature Revenge (2017), is a much more pointed attack, the U.S. setting a way to lure in audiences, but also to bring out the contradictions and horrors of consumerist society (which we all know was largely made in America) from the inside. While comparisons to David Cronenberg’s body horror are warranted, it’s also worth mentioning the name Paul Verhoeven, another sarcastic outsider in the land of the free. Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, by contrast, is a defanged satire of a young Donald Trump: distance from the subject does not here allow for any particular insight. It seems obvious that Trump didn’t succeed thanks only to Roy Cohn’s advice but was mostly the product of a political and economic environment Abbasi cares little about. The feedback from my American friends also confirmed that it is easier to find Trump funny or interesting if you haven’t lived under his maniacal rule. 

At this stage, you might be surprised to learn that I have any American friends at all. To be clear, the problem as I see it isn’t the presence of American films at the Cannes Film Festival, rather the kind of American cinema that the festival chose to highlight in this edition. In this context, the explicitly stated goal of Directors’ Fortnight artistic director Julien Rejl “to highlight the relevance and boldness of an American independent cinema that is giving itself new rules” feels pointed. The two films he was discussing, Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point and Carson Lund’s Eephus, continue the section’s dedication over these past few editions to a certain idea of American independent cinema, marked by levity and humour (sometimes concealing a disturbing darkness) as well as formal play: Owen Kline’s Funny Pages (2022), Weston Razooli’s Riddle of Fire (2023), and Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2023). In Jordan Cronk’s interview with Lund and Taormina for MUBI Notebook, the directors discuss feeling underappreciated or misunderstood at home, and being influenced most of all by European arthouse cinema.⁷ As the French say, la boucle est bouclée. 

Most importantly, this type of American cinema seems intent on evading the popular but oppressive idea of film as a provider of solutions for living – the utilitarian vision explicitly espoused by Coppola in Megalopolis via his stand-in, the mad genius Cesar Catilina. The character, played with riveting sincerity by the always dedicated Adam Driver, tells us that he creates his works of art in order to help people and share with the world the wisdom he has accumulated over the years. Yet as we know, the director of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) isn’t insensible to beauty: both Catilina and Coppola look for the perfect formula for the sublime, which they sincerely believe would solve all of the problems facing humanity. In one montage, Catilina paces up and down his office throwing off words and ideas while an assistant frantically tries to put them down on paper. That’s right: he is trying to word-cloud his way through architecture and urban living, but also life and art. 

This is the opposite of the healthy multiplicity of visions and points of view, ideas, changes, and flow that Cannes once embodied, and still does to some degree – but for how long? The greater focus on big, largely mainstream, all English-language directors creates an imbalance and makes it harder to even know how to discuss the other films on show. There once was a time when the worst that could be said about Cannes’ programming was that it cultivated the kind of films that only exist to furnish film festivals programmes. Cahiers du Cinéma had a more detailed and severe diagnosis when, in Haneke’s heyday, they decried the festival’s conception of art cinema as always cruel and austere. How exciting would it be to identify anything so specific in the arthouse cinema of Cannes today! Instead, Kirill Serebrennikov’s Competition entry Limonov: The Ballad harks back to a much more banal and vague conception of elevated, highbrow art.  Self-congratulating moments of formal bravado combine with grand statements about art and history to form a thoroughly meaningless window dressing exercise – it’s a juvenile type of macho cinema that feels ancient in itself, and whose presence in Competition suggests an old-fashioned equivalence between “foreign” and arthouse film. The only element of Limonov that links it to its era is, fittingly, that it too plays a part in the Americanisation of Cannes and arthouse cinema at large: the film is almost entirely in English, its titular Russian provocateur played by Ben Whishaw. Not even this antiquated type of arthouse is safe from American influence (some might say this is precisely what Limonov is about: the Russian poet defects to New York City and confronts difficult questions of identity in a modern world. If only!)  

Misericordia

Although Cannes never was a level playing field, it is even less so when the major force at play isn’t, say, social realism, or the grim sadism of Haneke and his disciples, but the already hegemonic power of English language, commercial auteurs. In that context, it seems relevant that two of the most striking and forward-thinking films I saw there knowingly played with narrative expectations. Alain Guiraudie’s Miséricorde (Misericordia) begins as a sad story of queer pain, grief, and desire, before abandoning all established formulas and proceeding to unfold like a farcical, exquisite corpse, each plot point another unexpected twist. The film’s ultimately positive and practical vision of the self, of guilt and forgiveness, is also quietly radical, miles away from the doom that once defined arthouse cinema. Likewise in Federico Luis’ debut feature Simón de la montaña (Simon of the Mountain), the titular protagonist’s morally thorny journey towards the life he wants confronts us with our assumptions about both characters in cinema, and the self. Both films explicitly show their protagonists evading precise and categorical definition, of the sort that is so common in cinema, but also in real life. Both films make a point of showing us that neither Simon nor Guiraudie’s character are, right now, all that they’ll ever be. They are always incomplete, in the process of becoming. It is that process that the two films, in their own way, celebrate. 

Although Misericordia found its fans, and Simon of the Mountain won the Grand Prize in Un Certain Regard, they deserved to cause more of a stir. So did Andrea Arnold’s Competition title Bird, like them, a strikingly pertinent reflection on the limitations put on individuals and their search for happiness. More than a retort to the common complaint that not all British social realist films have to be grey and dour, Arnold’s film is an attack on the cliché that poor people are too busy, sad, or stupid to be sensitive to beauty. 

Blue Sun Palace

Constance Tsang’s Blue Sun Palace, in Critics’ Week, likewise looks at disenfranchised characters with tenderness, yet without dehumanising pity. Her loving portrait of the New York Chinese community refuses to reduce her characters to unthinking products of their environments who simply accept their fate. In its unexpected ending, the film does not simply rebuff our narrative expectations. Like Misericordia, Simon of the Mountain, and Bird, it also points to a perceptive and modern understanding of people as never solely defined by or limited to their circumstances. Although they may appear to have few options, they do not blindly accept their lot. They are wise enough to know that it isn’t their fault they are struggling, and that their struggle does not define them. 

This humanist perspective has been at the heart of Sean Baker’s work since at least his second feature Take Out (co-directed with Tsou Shih-Ching, 2004), and it is fascinating to see just how much his Palme d’Or-winning film Anora has in common with the four films aforementioned. If the titular sex worker from Baker’s film desperately holds on to a rich client’s offer of marriage, it isn’t because she hopes true love might make an “honest woman” out of her – this isn’t Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990). Rather, she sees this unexpected proposal as a chance to leave behind a life in which she was, in the eyes of others, no more than her job. Her Russian beau and his goons may consider her a worker (in Anora at least, sex work is work, and she is handsomely paid for it), but they do not treat her any better than they treat the other workers whose services they pay for. Dehumanised, she would like to be seen as a person. 

Where do people and workers stand in Coppola’s megalomaniacal, utopian vision of the future? The abstract plans for his Megalopolis imagine that people would all, somehow, live fulfilling lives in a world that looks like an Apple product, designed by a lone genius. His utopia is – supposedly – a living city that allows for change without any friction. Is this what Cannes aspires to? Besides a very American program that relied on an appeal to consensus (we all love Star Wars, don’t we folks?), in the background of the festival was the hum of seasonal festival workers calling for a strike ahead of the event; rumours of a #MeToo exposé involving some of the biggest French actors working today; and apathy from the festival regarding the massacre in Gaza.⁸ 

Moi Aussi

A splashy premiere for the short film Moi Aussi (MeToo), directed by Judith Godrèche, the French actress who accused directors Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon of rape and sexual assault respectively, helped maintain the festival’s progressive credentials. So did the presence of filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, who fled Iran to present his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig in Competition. But the festival also hosted, in the midst of an ongoing massacre during which politicians and pundits grabbed onto any possible justification for it, the premiere of Yolande Zauberman’s La Belle de Gaza (The Belle from Gaza). This vague investigation into the urban legend of a Palestinian trans woman who’d supposedly found safety in Israel lacked the guts or the genuine interest to face the pertinent question raised by what is most likely a pinkwashing myth: ultimately, The Belle from Gaza conformed neatly to the core festival’s desire to stick to the tone of mainstream conversation. In Frémaux’s own words: “Last year, as you know, we had a few polemics,” he told journalists at a press conference ahead of the festival, “and we realised it, and so this year we decided to host a festival without polemics to make sure that the main interest for us all to be here is cinema.”⁹ (it is worth noting here that the Directors’ Fortnight hosted the premiere of Palestinian film To a Land Unknown by Mahdi Fleifel).

Seeing highly anticipated films for the first time, hanging out with friends you rarely meet otherwise, living for ten days on cheese and rosé in the sun: it isn’t difficult to get lost in the magic of the movies in Cannes. But all of these things become mere silver linings if the festival turns us into yet another machine for American cultural homogeneity and spineless consensus making. To not quite quote Demi Moore’s Elizabeth Sparkle in The Substance, another film from Cannes about trying to be a person while living under the forces of capitalism, we’re not monsters, we’re human beings.

Festival de Cannes
14 – 25 May 2024
https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/

Endnotes