NEAR THE BEGINNING of Arnaud Desplechin’s docfiction tribute to cinephilia, Spectateurs! (aka Filmlovers!), the French director describes the feeling that accompanied the arrival of the Seventh Art in his home country: “Cinema, at last.” A similar sentiment came to mind three nights into the Seventy-Seventh Cannes Film Festival while watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, which arrived on the Croisette like a shot of pure cinematic adrenaline after a few days of largely flat and unadventurous programming. Unsurprisingly, Coppola’s long-gestating passion project, about an ambitious architect (Adam Driver) attempting to rebuild a futuristic version of New York City as a sustainable utopia, was met with an extreme divisiveness unseen at Cannes since probably Southland Tales (2006), a similarly extravagant and wayward vision of American politics and modern media culture that fearlessly confronts the viewer’s thematic and aesthetic preconceptions. As an act of sheer folly, Megalopolis—which the eighty-five-year-old Coppola self-funded to the tune of $120 million, making it one of the most expensive independent films ever produced—demands to be reckoned with, its every garish green-screen flourish, oddball casting decision, and fourth-wall-breaking narrative device a simultaneous flex of creative freedom and affront to conventional notions of good taste. Not unlike Desplechin’s alter ego Paul Dédalus, who at one point in Spectateurs! claims to have seen Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) three times in the cinema—“once to discover it, a second to admire it, a third to learn from it”—we’ll no doubt be poring over the idiosyncrasies of Coppola’s latest for years to come.
As Spectateurs! illustrates, the French are often ahead of the curve on American cinema, and this year’s Cannes featured a number of US productions across its many sections, including the somewhat surprising winner of the Palme d’Or, Anora. While most pundits had predicted that either Mohammad Rasoulof, who fled Iran on foot to personally present his latest heavy-handed drama, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, or Payal Kapadia, whose lovely All We Imagine as Light was the first Indian film to screen in competition in thirty years, would take home top honors (Kapadia’s ended up winning the Grand Prix), it was ultimately Sean Baker’s seriocomic sex-worker spectacle that won out. Starring Mikey Madison as Ani, a Brighton Beach stripper who gets in over her head with the family of a rich-kid Russian client named Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), Anora doubles down on the balls-out energy of Baker’s previous feature, Red Rocket (2021), approaching Safdie brothers levels of intensity in its fable-like story of transactional sex and misplaced trust. After a meet-cute and a lap dance at the strip club where Ani works, she begins making house calls to Ivan’s waterfront mansion, where they fuck and smoke weed and eventually decide to get married—in Vegas. But when word gets back to Ivan’s parents that he’s married a “prostitute,” they send a trio of Armenian and Russian thugs to annul the nuptials. Needless to say, things escalate from there, with Baker demonstrating a newfound skill at grafting thriller-like elements onto his typically whip-smart comedic scenarios; in the film’s outrageous centerpiece sequence, Ani fights off the three enforcers with a near-slapstick resourcefulness, biting and clawing her way from their clutches. During the post-awards press conference, jury president Greta Gerwig likened Anora to the work of Ernst Lubitsch and Howard Hawks, a not-inapt comparison for a film that, among other things, puts the screw in screwball comedy.
Ever the cinephile, Baker took a moment during his Palme acceptance speech to mention the influence of two other filmmakers competing alongside him at Cannes: Coppola and David Cronenberg. While the mind reels at the thought of what Baker could do with $120 million, it’s more interesting to consider the ways he might continue to creatively work, as Cronenberg has, at a similar scale for the majority of his career. The Shrouds, the eighty-one-year-old Canadian maverick’s twenty-third feature, is among his most intimate and personal to date—and this just two years after the science fiction chamber drama Crimes of the Future (2022) found the director obliquely reflecting on old age and the trauma of loss. Here, he turns this subtext into text. Inspired by the death of Cronenberg’s wife, The Shrouds stars Vincent Cassel as Karsh, a wealthy widower and entrepreneur who owns a restaurant with an attached cemetery where the living can surveil the graves of their loved ones through the use of high-tech burial shrouds and a state-of-the-art video monitoring system. This is where Karsh’s late wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), is buried, and it’s one way he copes with the grief of her passing—at least until one night when the cemetery is vandalized, setting off a possible conspiracy involving its Chinese investors. Meanwhile, Karsh’s erotic dreams of Becca are growing increasingly macabre, just as his relationships with Becca’s twin sister, Terry (also played by Kruger), and her IT worker ex-husband, Maury (Guy Pearce), are becoming suspiciously intertwined. If this sounds a little like a lot of Cronenberg films, it is. Where The Shrouds excels is in its unguarded emotion and uncannily digitized atmosphere, as if the entire film were transpiring in a state of suspended animation. It’s also a uniquely talky work, cold, knotty, and complex, a film of ideas and ethical inquiries that are voiced by multiple characters in various guises. It’s little wonder that it went home empty-handed.
The competition’s two other standouts, Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides and Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour, make for an unlikely pair. In each, a woman is abandoned by a man, who she then follows over an extended period of time in hopes of reconciling with. In Jia’s quietly radical triptych, documentary footage and outtakes shot by the director during the making of his earlier Unknown Pleasures (2002) and Still Life (2006)—both films starring Zhao Tao and Li Zhubin—are paired with new scenes with those same actors in the present day. Following Zhao’s silent protagonist as she sets off in search of Li’s character from Datong, the setting of the earlier film, to the Three Gorges region, so memorably captured in the latter, to the couple’s eventual reunion back in Shanxi, Jia is able to forge a nearly dialogue-free story (it’s told mostly through intertitles and text messages) of star-crossed lovers from otherwise disparate material while at the same time charting a course through modern-day China, which underwent major cultural and economic developments over the twenty years captured in the film.
Grand Tour, too, has a documentary component: During preproduction, before the script was even written, a small crew took two trips to Southeast Asia (the second of which Gomes had to oversee remotely due to Covid) to shoot 16-mm footage of everyday life in Yangon, Singapore, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Manila, Osaka, and Shanghai—the same route taken by the film’s protagonist, Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a British civil servant on assignment in 1918 Burma who flees the country on the day his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), arrives to tie the knot. Based on a passage from William Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour, Grand Tour is told in two parts, beginning with Edward, who cowardly schleps between each of these exotic locales (often sidestepping disaster in the process), before restarting halfway through to track Molly’s happy-go-lucky journey through these same settings to locate her betrothed. Like Anora, this is a film in conversation with classical Hollywood—though Gomes, who picked up a well-deserved Best Director prize, went one step further by shooting the fictional scenes on a soundstage and in black-and-white, allowing the documentary footage to provide the proverbial color to this surreal cinematic travelogue.
Odes to cinema were a theme of this year’s festival. In addition to Grand Tour and Spectateurs!, which was presented in the Special Screenings section, there was Quentin Dupieux’s Out of Competition opening-night selection The Second Act, a meta-satiric send-up of modern film industry ethics; and Jonás Trueba’s The Other Way Around, the highlight of a very solid Directors’ Fortnight, in which the reality of a filmmaker couple’s breakup merges with the fiction of the movie they’re making together. Best of all were two short-to-medium-length works tucked unceremoniously into sidebar programs: Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me (Cannes Premiere) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Scénarios (Cannes Classics). (Speaking of sidebars: Both Alain Guiraudie’s salacious small-town-murder comedy Misericordia and Roberto Minervini’s arresting Civil War drama The Damned, which screened in Cannes Premiere and Un Certain Regard, respectively, could have easily played with the best in competition, if not for the festival’s apparently requisite need to promote the perennially subpar likes of Paolo Sorrentino and Michel Hazanavicius, among others.) In Carax’s forty-one-minute self-portrait, the French iconoclast looks back on his four-decade career in surprisingly playful fashion, juxtaposing clips from his films with archival footage, newly shot sequences featuring cameos from such memorable Carax creations as Monsieur Merde (Denis Levant) and Baby Annette, and reams of audio and visual ephemera related to his inspirations—namely Godard, whose prismatic essay-films provide the template for this shape-shifting curio.
Some complained that It’s Not Me was too indebted to Godard, as if early Carax classics like Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvais Sang (1986) didn’t openly ape the late director’s own formative style. Completed by Godard the day before his assisted suicide in September 2022, the eighteen-minute Scénarios—which screened alongside the thirty-four-minute Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario,” in which Godard lays out his ideas for a feature-length version of this film that was abandoned—is a plainly summative work, with numerous references to death, finality, and the body; one of the film’s motifs involves the harsh sounds of an MRI scan. In voiceover, Godard reflects on his art through a familiar combination of aphorisms, citations, and references to cinema history and the politics of imagemaking while excerpts from his films (Weekend, 1967; Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, 1991; etc.) and others by Welles, Rossellini, and Cassavetes create disorienting juxtapositions with the director’s handmade collages featuring cutout images of wartime atrocities, art, and nature. Throughout, Godard returns to a quote by Sartre: “Using a horse to illustrate that a horse is not a horse is less efficient than using a non-horse to illustrate that a horse is not a horse.” Seated on the edge of his bed with his shirt open in the film’s final image—and the festival’s most moving moment—he repeats the adage one last time and writes it in his notebook. He then looks up at the camera and, as if to quietly say goodbye, utters, simply, “Okay.”
