Cannes Film Festival 2017: news and movie reviews

For more than 70 years, everyone who’s anyone in the film world — and lots of people who want to be — have migrated to the French Riviera in May for the biggest event of the year: the Cannes Film Festival, which combines glitzy, star-studded red-carpet premieres with long, exhausting days of screenings, meetings, networking, and parties.

Even though there are many obvious differences between a 12-day film festival and an awards show, Cannes is as big a deal as the Oscars. And while most people know the festival by name, there’s plenty about the event that’s mysterious to to people who don’t work in the film industry. So as the festival’s 72nd installment kicks off, running from May 14 to 25, 2019, here are answers to eight of the biggest questions you may have about Cannes.

When notoriously provocative director Michael Haneke (Funny Games, Amour) makes a movie with a name like Happy End, you can be pretty sure the film’s conclusion will be anything but cheery. Haneke doesn’t do happy endings.

But Happy End’s beginning is just as quintessentially Haneke: It starts silently, with Instagram Live-style videos that observe a woman brushing her teeth before bed as the text onscreen predicts what she’s about to do next: brush, rinse, spit, pee, flush, and so on. Then we see a hamster digging into a bowl of food as the text describes what the hamster’s about to eat. Then another, more gruesome scene.

If, as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then The Square’s Christian (Claes Bang) is headed straight to Hades. But then again, the movie would like to remind us, the rest of us are right behind him.

Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May for The Square, his high-concept takedown of our high-minded ideals and the myriad ways we flub them in execution. Burying self-referential allusions in the background and merrily poking viewers till they bruise, The Square at times feels more like longform performance art than a narrative film. It’s social satire by way of art-world comedy, and no woke participant is exempt from its barbs.

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos honed his signature style in films like Dogtooth and The Lobster: His actors deliver stilted, formal lines with intentionally over-mannered delivery that belies their ludicrous situations, be it a family that’s kept its adult children from ever interacting with the world, or the residents of a hotel where everyone must find a mate within a few weeks or be turned into an animal. This weird formal style creates the illusion of a placid surface, which is invariably punctuated by grotesque, shocking violence.

The whole effect is calculated to both offend and make viewers sit up straighter, knowing that Lanthimos has some idea bubbling beneath the surface — usually a criticism of the norms that govern ostensibly polite societies.

Because kids grow up to be adults, giving them smart and artful cinema seems just as important to their development as giving them smart and artful books — to give them, essentially, a training ground for learning to approach the world with serious, sustained attention. But kids’ movies that treat their young audience as if they’re smart and capable of appreciating lush visual storytelling are rare.

Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck is filmmaking par excellence and a great film for children to boot. Moving and innovatively told, it may even be too smart for some adults. Kids will get it just fine, though.

Noah Baumbach may be American cinema’s greatest chronicler of family dysfunction — and his newest film, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), may be one of his finest entries in the genre.

While Baumbach’s excellent recent movies (like 2012’s Frances Ha, 2014’s While We’re Young, and 2015’s Mistress America) are gentle comedies about youth and inexperience, The Meyerowitz Stories returns, for the most part, to familiar topics from the director’s earlier, darker comedies. Like 2005’s The Squid and the Whale and 2007’s Margot at the Wedding, this latest work concerns messed-up cosmopolitan children and their messed-up cosmopolitan parents; intellectual egotists who are lovable in spite of themselves; the fear of never really amounting to anything.

Sean Baker’s 2015 film Tangerine first garnered attention at its Sundance premiere for having been shot entirely on an iPhone. But those who watched it quickly discovered it was also a fine piece of subversive, madcap, empathetic filmmaking — a story set on the sidewalks and in the alleys and all-night doughnut shops of Los Angeles, with prostitutes and pimps as its carefully drawn romantic leads.

And now, with The Florida Project — one of the most highly buzzed-about films at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section — Baker’s skill as a loving humanist chronicler of America’s garish forgotten places has ripened into something truly marvelous.

The Beguiled masquerades as a Southern Gothic tale, with all the requisite grotesquerie. But beneath its frilly, corseted bodice, it’s a stone-cold revenge fantasy, laced with a potent cocktail of toxic comedy and pungent desire.

The film’s fixation on revenge means it feels considerably tighter and simpler than its marketing might have led you to believe. This isn’t the wild, extravagant romp of director Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, nor does it lean so plainly on the hormonal teenage angst of The Virgin Suicides. Simple, irresistible desire is what drives revenge movies — desire for retribution, inexorably enacted. And The Beguiled is set at Miss Martha Farnsworth’s Seminary for Young Ladies, a hotbed of sublimated desire and good breeding. (Following the film’s premiere at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, Coppola became the second woman in Cannes history to win the Best Director award.)

The Cannes Film Festival celebrated its 70th birthday this year under a cloud of global political unrest — a state of affairs that was hard to ignore at the fest, with the presence of machine gun-toting soldiers on the red carpet among the tuxedos and ballgowns, and the extraordinary security measures required to just enter a movie theater (one or two bag checks, plus both walk-through and wand metal detectors). One evening, a bomb threat sent thousands of disgruntled people into the streets as the Palais des Festivals was evacuated.

Early in the festival, the news of the Trump administration’s ongoing corruption scandal would start breaking in mid-afternoon, as the US East Coast was waking up, and continue late into the night. And though the time difference and lack of ready wifi access at Cannes made it easy to sink into the cocoon of cinema and glamour and ignore the shenanigans stateside, Monday night’s suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, and the resulting heightened state of alert, was a wake-up call. The festival observed a moment of silence in honor of the Manchester victims at 3 pm on Tuesday. On Friday, the flags on the Palais des Festivals were still flying at half-mast even as news broke of gunmen in Egypt killing 23 Coptic Christians.

The 70th Cannes Film Festival concluded on Sunday, May 28 with a glittering awards ceremony, hosted by Monica Bellucci, that honored the year’s films and brought some surprises.

The films Cannes picks for its screenings and awards inevitably land on the must-watch lists of cinephiles around the world. But this year’s entries served up plenty of films for casual moviegoers with a taste for adventure too. Two of the festival’s selections will be released in the United States within the next month: Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, which heads straight to Netflix on June 28, and Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, which opens in theaters on June 30.

Every iteration of the Cannes Film Festival needs some controversy to anchor it — it’s practically written into the festival’s bylaws. The 2017 edition got its start early, with Netflix (which produced two films in competition, Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories) and the professional association for French movie theater owners at loggerheads over Netflix’s refusal to open the two films in theaters in France.

On first blush, the issue looks like a legal one. French law mandates that a movie will not release on streaming services until 36 months — that’s three years — after its French theatrical run. By contrast, movies in the US only lag by a few months — and these days sometimes there’s no lag at all, with streaming services like Netflix and Amazon sometimes releasing films a week after, or even on the same day as, the theatrical release. (The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences mandates that a film must have at least a one-week theatrical run in New York and Los Angeles to be considered for an Oscar, which in some cases is why some films get extremely brief and limited theatrical releases.)

As a member of the jury for the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, Jessica Chastain saw 20 of the film industry’s most exciting new movies from all over the world — but she also saw a troubling pattern.

“One thing I got to take away from this experience is how the world views women, from the female characters I saw represented,” the Academy Award-nominated actress said at the festival’s final press conference. “It was quite disturbing to me, to be honest.”

There’s really no better way to get to know a country than to road trip through it. Two films that just debuted at the Cannes Film Festival — Faces Places and Promised Land — take that dictum seriously.

In both films, the directors set out in a car to travel through their home countries (France and the United States, respectively), in search of the stories, people, buildings, and art that define each one. Both deliver self-referential portraits of the countries themselves and the hearts that beat beneath them. France and America are very different, but it turns out the best way to take the pulse of each is quite similar.

Cannes loves its controversy, whether it’s about Woody Allen or high heels on the red carpet. This year the controverse du festival kicked off early, when two Netflix films were selected to play in competition, and then met resistance from French theater owners since the films aren’t slated for theatrical release in France. The festival announced a new policy (beginning in 2018) in response, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings voiced his disapproval, and at the opening press conference on Wednesday, Will Smith feuded with Pedro Almodóvar over it.

It stayed quiet until Friday morning, when the first of the two Netflix films, Bong Joon Ho’s Okja, played at the Grand Théâtre Lumière for critics in advance of its evening premiere. There was no surprise (and a lot of laughter) when people booed at the appearance of the Netflix logo before the film. It would have been more surprising if nobody made a sound.