What We Saw In Cannes

In a decision that made its awards audience erupt into a standing ovation, the Cannes Film Festival gave the Palme d’Or to Jafar Panahi’s secretly filmed It Was Just an Accident, the persecuted Iranian director’s blistering indictment of his home country’s enduringly oppressive regime. The drama, both bitterly comic and alarmingly severe, follows a former political prisoner who kidnaps and intends to kill a man that may or may not have been his interrogator in prison. It was easily the festival’s most overtly political gesture in years—possibly since Abbas Kiarostami’s film Taste of Cherry won in 1997, the first and only other time an Iranian film won the festival’s top prize. 

Panahi—who aptly started out as Kiarostami’s former assistant—has been imprisoned twice and endured a 20-year filmmaking and travel ban, repeatedly flaunting those restrictions with clandestine productions born of remarkably inventive determination. The Palme d’Or also makes him one of only four filmmakers, including Henri-Georges Clouzot, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Robert Altman, to have achieved the Triple Crown of Film Festivals, previously nabbing the top prizes at Venice, for 2000’s The Circle, and Berlin, for 2015’s Taxi.

Second-place Jury Prize went to Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier’s stirring family drama about an absentee filmmaker father (Stellan Skarsgård) trying to reconnect with his bitter actress daughter (Renate Reinsve) by writing her a starring role in his upcoming autofiction. Also starring Elle Fanning as the fawning starlet eager to land the part, Trier’s follow-up to his acclaimed breakthrough The Worst Person in the World received praise all week, if not more commercial prospects stateside when the film opens this fall.

Jury Prize, shared in an Ex-Æquo decision, went to two films. Mascha Schilinski’s dour Sound of Falling is an accomplished, at times even astounding, but willfully obscure hardcore arthouse entry about three generations of forlorn women—some exploited, others abused—at the same farmhouse over the course of a century. And Oliver Laxe’s wonderfully weird head trip Sirât depicts a father’s journey through the Moroccan desert looking for a lost daughter last seen at a rave—just as global conflagration erupts and turns his search into an existential reckoning for survival. Think Coachella meets Fury Road, with a dash of brooding meditations like Zabriskie Point and haunting genre thrill-rides like Sorcerer and Wages of Fear. 

The Riviera had its requisite share of Hollywood glamor, with Tom Cruise tubthumping his latest daredevilry in Mission: Impossible—the Final Reckoning. Spike Lee brought the World Premiere of Highest 2 Lowest, his juicy update of Akira Kurosawa’s ransom thriller High and Low with a swaggering lead performance from Denzel Washington and a crackling villainous role for A$AP Rocky. And Wes Anderson delivered his most playful film in years with the star-studded The Phoenician Scheme, with Benicio Del Toro as a charmingly duplicitous midcentury industrialist trying to pull off the biggest land deal of his life while indoctrinating his neglected daughter-turned-nun in the family business. 

The sexiest films were also the most hilarious ones on the Croisette, especially Harry Lighton’s outrageously lighthearted BDSM biker love story Pillion, with Harry Melling’s supine sub eagerly bootlicking his way into tall, handsome dom Alexander Skarsgård’s heart—or at least his bulging pants. And Michael Angelo Covino’s smartly funny Splitsville, co-written with co-star Kyle Marvin, has the pair playing unhappily married men whose smokeshow wives Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona have open minds about open marriages—with emotionally disastrous consequences and at least one brilliantly inventive fight scene that nearly destroys the bespoke interior of a very posh home.

But the single film of the festival that was absolute catnip to the world’s cinephiles was Richard Linklater’s French-language Novelle Vague, a meticulously adoring behind-the-scenes look at Jean-Luc Godard (Gillaume Marback)and his eccentric debut as a filmmaker with the seismic masterpiece Breathless. The Texan auteur conjures 1959 Paris with incredible fidelity, capturing the two dozen major personalities who formed the French New Wave—all the Cahiers du Cinema writers-turned-directors like François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette—not to mention essential Breathless contributors like cinematographer Raoul Coutard, producer Geroges de Beauregard, and assistant director Pierre Rissient. But the heart of the production is Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg and Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo, with both actors capturing the spontaneous electricity of the shoot, in all its messy, unpredictable, off-the-cuff shoestring grandeur.