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Ten things we learned f-rom the cannes film festival

The Palme d’Or has been handed to Ken Loach for I, Daniel Blake, drawing the festival to a close. But what lessons can we take f-rom the whole 12-day circus? Matthew Anderson offers some thoughts.
1.Terrorism has given France the jitters

A squad of bored-looking soldiers with enormous guns was on hand to greet excited festival-goers touching down at Nice Airport, an ominous sign that this year security would be both tight and tiresome. France’s official terror threat level is still ‘extremely high’ following the November attacks on Paris, and France’s interior ministry and the festival’s organisers were taking no risks. A few weeks beforehand, they simulated a terrorist atrocity in a drill that tested the responses of police, military, firefighters and medical staff. The dramatic scenes would not have looked out of place in a Hollywood action blockbuster. Thank goodness the festival itself passed off without incident: bag searches, security wands and confiscated liquids were the worst we had to deal with.

2. A shadow still hangs over Woody Allen

There was however, one incendiary device lobbed in the festival’s direction when, writing in the Hollywood Reporter, Woody Allen’s estranged son Ronan Farrow once again raised allegations of sexual abuse against the film-maker by his daughter Dylan. There was a conspiracy of silence and a culture of acquiescence f-rom the media, he claimed. Allen’s latest film Café Society was the festival’s curtain raiser and at the opening ceremony, MC Laurent Lafitte addressed a joke to the 79-year-old director: “It’s very nice that you’ve been shooting so many movies in Europe, even if you are not being convicted for rape in the US.” The comment caused a minor sensation among journalists gagging for some controversy, but the general consensus was that it was simply ill-advised and in poor taste. It’s very difficult to be funny about rape – and we shall return to this subject later.

3. Kristen Stewart is the Queen of Cannes

Last year France paid a rare honour to an American actor when judges gave Stewart a César Award, the country’s equivalent of an Oscar. In Cannes, enthusiasm for the 26-year-old was clear for all to see. La K-Stew was everywhe-re, her sultry face staring out f-rom magazine covers in the kiosks and adverts on the bollards that line the Croisette. In Café Society, she delivered a confident, grown-up performance which might have heralded a new, more mature phase in her career – but she was back in the lip-chewing, adolescent mode of the Twilight movies in Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper. This film divided the festival, and the booing that greeted it – counterbalanced by applause, it must be said – only served to ratchet up media interest in its star. Stewart’s red carpet turns were lapped up by the gossip and fashion press, not to mention her enthusiastic and scarily organised legion of fans online.

4. Booing is best saved for the end

Cannes’ audiences love to boo. (Hisses, catcalls, jeers and strangulated hooting tones are not unheard of either.) So it was surprising that in the festival’s first week, many films were greeted with unusual warmth and positivity. But then came Personal Shopper. While some critics found this ghost story set in the fashion world a work of mad, genre-bending genius, others weren’t so keen – and so the strange bovine sounds rose up. Reacquainted with booing’s joys, they shouted “Trash!” (in Spanish) at Nicholas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, before moving on to savage Sean Penn’s The Last Face. One of the last to play in competition, this film was the clear turkey of the festival, described by one critic as “a stunningly self-important but numbingly empty cocktail of romance and insulting refugee porn.” As if that weren’t bad enough, the film’s press conference raised awkwardness to new levels, placing a grimacing Penn on the same panel as his ex C-harlize Theron, for the gleeful enjoyment of the baying press.

5. Long movies leave you gasping

We stood in epic queues in the beating Côte d’Azur sunshine before surrendering our water bottles to the festival’s zealous security guards, and this left many in the audience parched throughout some rather long films. Park Chan-wook’s The Handmiaden clocked in at 145 minutes, Andrea Arnold’s American Honey and Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann both ran for 162 minutes and Christi Puiu’s Sieranavada – a Romanian black comedy of machine gun-like dialogue – racked up a whopping 173. There were dry mouths at the end of them all, but perhaps this was the lesser of two evils: the al-ternative for a properly hydrated audience is, of course, a very long wait for the loo.

6. The red carpet is the place for protest

Cast your mind back to 2015 – perhaps you remember ‘heelgate’? The brouhaha that ensued when some women were turned away f-rom the red carpet for wearing ‘inappropriate footwear’ was the big story of last year’s festival, and several stars had not forgotten it. When Julia Roberts strode the carpet barefoot at the Money Monster premiere, her unshod tootsies were a clarion call of feminist solidarity. A few days later American Honey’s Sasha Lane followed suit. Kristen Stewart was in on the act too, tottering past the cameras in a pair of towering Christian Louboutin heels, but then ditching these for some comfy, battered Vans. A less frivolous statement was made by the cast of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius, who posed solemnly on the rug with signs reading "Brazil is not a democracy anymore”, and “The world cannot accept this illegitimate government”, in protest against the impeachment of Brazil’s president, Dilma Rouseff.

7. It sucks to be poor – but help is at hand

All the yachts, posh frocks and glittering parties make an odd backd-rop against which to screen gritty, social realist films, but as always in Cannes, a noticeable number took the poor and downtrodden as their focus. In the competition, Ken Loach, Andrea Arnold, Brilliante Mendoza and the Dardenne Brothers all examined the harsh realities of contemporary poverty – but what can actually be done about inequality? Strangely enough,Thomas Piketty was on hand with some ideas. The French economist and best-selling author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century – surely the most purchased but least read book since Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time – was in town to announce an upcoming movie of his 700-odd page tome. New Zealand documentary maker Justin Pemberton will direct; shooting begins in August.

8. Cannes has the taste for human flesh

Werewolves and vampires are so five-minutes-ago: this year, it’s all about the cannibals. Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon featured flesh-eating fashion models; urchins chomped cheerfully on Juliette Binoche’s corpse in Bruno Dumont’s Slack Bay; and in Raw, a break-out hit f-rom the festival’s Critics’ Week sidebar, a vegetarian student suffered a spectacular lapse. In The BFG however, the cannibalism was toned down: most of the child eating in Roald Dahl’s book has been excised f-rom Stephen Spielberg’s adaptation.

9. Humour can come f-rom the most unlikely sources

The Germans can come across as a rather dour lot – but in private many actually have a rather silly sense of humour with a sharp sense of the absurd. It was exactly these qualities that wowed the critics in Berlin-based director Maren Ade’s comedy Toni Erdmann, which established itself as the front-runner for the Palme d’Or early in the festival. That the Germans can be funny is one thing; a film about rape is something else entirely. The assault of a woman was at the centre of two deadly serious pictures in competition this year – Christian Mungiu’s Graduation and Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman – as well as one enjoyably ridiculous one. Paul Verhoven’s Elle stars Isabelle Huppert as a wealthy, amoral businesswoman who, after she is attacked in her stylish Paris home, seeks revenge on her assailant – initially, at least. If any film on the bill seemed guaranteed to raise its audience’s hackles, it was this. But somehow, by some strange mastery of his craft, the Robocop and Basic Instinct director won us over and, before we’d had time to consider what exactly it might mean to cheer a comedy about rape, we thundered our applause as the credits rolled. Perhaps the last of Elle’s many laughs had gone to Paul Verhoeven.

10. For the jury, seriousness trumps silliness

Although Toni Erdmann had the wind at its back for much of the festival, in the end it was a picture f-rom a Cannes regular that took the top prize. This year’s victory is the second time Ken Loach will return f-rom Cannes with the Palme d’Or, having already won the award in 2006 for The Wind that Shakes the Barley. I, Daniel Blake is the story of a carpenter f-rom Newcastle in the north of England who can’t work after a heart attack but is forced by an uncaring system to apply for jobs he could never actually perform. The film was praised for its dignity and humanity, juxtaposing Daniel’s trials and frustrations with scenes of humour and acts of kindness, and it had the audience applauding and weeping early in the festival’s proceedings. A film with a sober message has triumphed at the end of these 12 long days – but for those of us lucky enough to be here, it’s all been plenty of fun.

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Author: BBC News

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