THE 70th Cannes Film Festival gets underway today, and it seems like festival artistic director Thierry Frémaux and his team have pulled out all the stops to create one of the more enticing line-ups in years. Heavy-hitters like Todd Haynes, Sofia Coppola and Michael Haneke are headlining the competition. Giants like former Palme d'Or winners David Lynch and Jane Campion are also returning. And this year finally marks the moment that Cannes has recognised that television really is a big deal these days.
Opening with Arnaud Desplechin's Ismael's Ghosts, with festival favourites Charlotte Gainsbourg and Marion Cotillard, the most intriguing competition entry, certainly from a local perspective, doesn't occur until the final Saturday. It's been six years since Glasgow-born Lynne Ramsay last appeared on the Croisette with the sensational Lionel Shriver adaptation, We Need To Talk About Kevin. But since then, it’s been a difficult period in her career after she quit the western Jane Got A Gun shortly before production was due to begin.
Her new film, You Were Never Really Here, has been largely made under the radar. Based on the Jonathan Ames novel, it stars Joaquin Phoenix in a story about a war veteran whose attempts to extricate a girl from a sex-traffic ring go horribly wrong. Said to be a revenge fantasy with comparisons to Drive (though its hard to imagine Ramsay being quite so stylised as Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn), Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood – who worked on the music for Kevin – is providing the score.
Beyond that, the smart money will be on Michael Haneke to become the only filmmaker in history to claim a third Palme d'Or (after his last two films, The White Ribbon and Amour). His new movie Happy End has a sharp political edge to it, concerning a wealthy bourgeois family living close to the refugee camps in Calais. Another competition entry casting a concerned eye is Fatih Akin's In The Fade, the story of a German-Turkish man who burns with injustice after prejudicial treatment following a bomb explosion in Hamburg.
Other notables in competition include Sofia Coppola's return to the festival (where her 2006 movie Marie Antoinette was roundly booed). This time she's back with The Beguiled, an all-star adaptation of the Thomas P. Cullinan Civil War-set novel A Painted Devil (previously made by Don Siegel, with Clint Eastwood). Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell head the cast, a pairing that can also be seen in Yorgos Lanthimos' fellow competition title The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The story of a troubled teenage boy and a surgeon, it's another offbeat-sounding tale from the director of The Lobster.
Judging by the enthusiastic response to his last film, Carol, Todd Haynes' new movie Wonderstruck will also be a must-catch. Adapted from the novel by Brian Selznick (who also wrote the book that inspired Martin Scorsese's Hugo), it follows the story of two deaf children, living fifty years apart. Whether it will be enough to convince jury head Pedro Almodóvar to award Haynes the Palme d'Or – arguably his body-of-works merits one – remains to be seen, but this feels like a film liable to leave even the most cynical, sleep-deprived hacks damp-eyed.
In truth, the most exciting moment of the festival will surely be the unveiling of the first two episodes of the long-awaited third season of Twin Peaks. David Lynch and Mark Frost’s groundbreaking murder-mystery show returns after a quarter-of-a-century, with many of the original cast back and guest stars ranging from Naomi Watts and Monica Bellucci to Tim Roth and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Secrecy has been paramount, with Lynch only teasing a few images of classic locations and shots of Kyle MacLachlan's returning FBI agent Dale Cooper.
It's not the only TV premiere, with early episodes from season two of Jane Campion's own mystery-drama Top of the Lake also being unveiled. While both these are billed as special 70th anniversary screenings – a hint that Cannes doesn't normally welcome television into an exclusively cinematic arena – more significant this year is the arrival of two films in competition owned by streaming giant Netflix. When these are released, you'll need to turn on your TV (assuming you have a subscription) rather than visit your local theatre.
The first is Okja, a thriller by the South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho, featuring Tilda Swinton, Lily Collins and Jake Gyllenhaal, about a girl, a beast and a corporation. This being the director who brought us allegorical monster movie The Host, it's fascinating to think what he'll do with a larger canvas. The other Netflix entrant is Noah Baumbach's The Meyerowitz Stories, a New York comedy-drama about a Jewish family featuring Ben Stiller (a regular for the director, back to Greenberg), Adam Sandler and Dustin Hoffman. Cannes may be 70 but this feels like the beginning of a new era.
The 70th Cannes Film Festival runs from May 17th to May 28th.
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