The Politics of Cannes

“It is my honor….to declare…THE 78^th FESTIVAL DE CANNES TO BE OFFICIALLY OOOPPPEEEEENNNN!” bellowed Quentin Tarantino on the Opening Night of the Cannes Film Festival last week, dropping his best Michael Buffer imitation before literally dropping the mic and stomping off the stage in a stiff-armed robotic gait.

 From Day One, Cannes was ready to rumble, starting with Jury President Juliette Binoche weighing in on national icon Gérard Depardieu’s sexual assault conviction—“He is no longer sacred,” she said in a sang-froid diss—and continuing with Honorary Palme d’Or winner Robert De Niro calling Trump “America’s philistine president.” 

 “The arts are democratic,” said De Niro. “Art is inclusive. Art looks for truth. And that’s why art is a threat—we are a threat—to autocrats and fascists. You can’t put a price on creativity. But apparently you can put a tariff on it.”

The films in competition for the Palme d’Or have been happy to oblige De Niro’s sentiment, with stylishly unvarnished examinations of good people buckling under the strain of political systems corrupted from their original intent. 

Sergei Loznitsa’s slow-burn historical drama Two Prosecutors, set in 1937 during the height of Stalin’s Great Purge, was one of the first and certainly the most overtly anti-authoritarian indictments to unspool in Cannes. Idealistic lawyer Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), investigating accusations of dissident torture at the Bryansk prison, finds himself threading his way through the Kafkaesque bureaucracies of both the local warden’s minions and the state’s legal institutions that feels increasingly designed to crush his spirit—if not his life.

Dominick Moll’s French procedural Dossier 137, an engrossing look at an internal police investigation into excessive force in 2018 during the Gilets Jaunes protests in the streets of Paris. Starring Léa Drucker, this effective retelling of the case is an honest attempt at upholding systems intended to protect citizens and hold officers accountable for their actions, despite tragically devolving into the inevitable doublespeak of legal loopholes and cops closing ranks to protect their own.

But the most entertainingly provocative political statement so far came from Ari Aster’s surrealistic freakout Eddington. The baroque Covid-era satire—set in May 2020—stars Joaquin Phoenix as Joe Cross, a frustrated small-town New Mexico sheriff bristling under lockdown conditions and Pedro Pascal as Ted Garcia, the soft-spoken, mask-wearing local mayor who’s keen on selling out Eddington to a tech corporation thirsty for server farms. 

Emma Stone plays Cross’ troubled wife Louise, who falls gradually under the spell of charismatic cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). And as conspiracy theories percolate on YouTube, Black Lives Matter protests begin to sprout among anti-racist white high schoolers, and Cross starts touting MAGA-inflected placards, neighbors gradually turn one against the other. The thematic target is knee-jerk radicalization, as Aster turns the 145-minute film into another of his incisive horror shows revealing the low-key terror informing our modern lives.

Sexual politics are also at play on the Croisette, with film after film revealing the many flavors of toxic masculinity du jour—historic, socio-economic, endemic, you name it. Mascha Schilinski’s hauntingly directed and ravishingly lensed but willfully obscure Sound of Falling, is an emotionally fraught look at one German family’s farm over the course of the past century. Granddaughters, mothers, children, and their progeny all suffer various states of morbid ennui. It’s like a Teutonic Virgin Suicides, but with more overt abuse. Spoiler: Forced sterilization for the maids and at least one overt case of incest might just contribute to their pervasive sense of despair. 

Kristen Stewart delivered a blistering directorial debut with Chronology of Water, her adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s redemptive memoir recounting how early sexual abuse from her father led to a life of wayward sex and drugs before she found solace and rebirth as a writer. Imogen Poots stars as Lidia, and her dazzling performance is an absolute go-for-broke heartbreaker. 

 But most batshit crazy acting goes to Jennifer Lawrence in Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, a tortured drama about a tortured woman in the manic throes of postpartum depression. Co-starring Robert Pattinson as Lawrence’s dazed-and-confused husband, Die My Love depicts the Hunger Games star with an eye-popping physicality—crawling like a panther, feverishly masturbating, lactating pools of milk, running around naked, scratching the walls with bloody vigor and heaving herself through a glass door. It’s a tour de force for the Oscar winner, who also produced the film and asked Ramsey to direct. MUBI snapped up U.S. distribution rights for $24 million, so expect Lawrence to go to the mat for this labor of love about the devastating pain that sometimes follows labor.