Cannes Still Matters, Despite Everything - Vanity Fair

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A final dispatch from the Croisette, where even frequent COVID testing and a low-key party scene couldn’t completely dim the peculiar magic of Cannes.

By Richard Lawson

July 16, 2021

The beginning of this year’s Cannes Film Festival was the most stressful I’ve ever experienced. The combination of COVID fears and extremely humid July heat hit me like an out-of-control megayacht. What was I doing here? Was this all a terrible mistake? That mood was shared by many of the colleagues I spoke to in the early days of last week, all of us stumbling around on Bambi legs after so many months off of the film-festival beat.

But then I went to see my first movie here, Nadav Lapid’s Ahed’s Knee, and I was immediately reminded of this festival’s potential for genuine grandeur. I was frustrated and sweaty and already prepared to give up—I’d been pulled out of line for wearing shorts, so had to race back to my apartment to change and then race right back to the theater—and yet then there was the lovely Cannes logo presentation scored to the traditional festival intro music (Camille Saint-Saëns’s “L’aquarium”), and then the roaring blast of Lapid’s opening scene. What a happy jolt it was to sit in front of cinema so looming, arriving with what felt like real consequential weight.

Everyone has said some version of the same thing. The opening night ceremonies were all about the great return—to life, to movies, to the ridiculous opulence and formality that Cannes revels in (and preserves to increasingly detrimental effect). We were back, and how weird that was, but also how great. We were COVID tested every two days (those of us who were not vaccinated in the E.U., anyway), and masks were required indoors. There was a creeping stress about the delta variant lurking around every interaction. But we were doing something so vastly different than anything we’d done over the last 18 months that it was briefly, perhaps recklessly, possible to forget all that real-world stuff.

Of course, that experience varied. Some people here started uncomfortable and grew only worse; colleagues retreated from socializing, and I saw many more masks worn outdoors during the second week of the festival than I did during the first. Though it’s tough to tell who was a masked festivalgoer and who was just an onlooker: Cannes is normally in May, before the high tourist season begins. Not so this year. The combination of regular summer population swell and the madness of the Euro Cup finals essentially rendered the festival an afterthought in the eyes of the Cannes masse, the festival noticeable only for the traffic snarls it caused and the occasional celebrity sightings. I’m eager for Cannes to return to its usual May slot, when it can really fill the town in a way I’m sure locals resent but are at least used to.

I say occasional celebrity sighting because this was not a terribly starry year at Cannes. A lot of talent stayed home or emerged from hotel suites only to attend very private, exclusive parties. The bigger and slightly more accessible parties—typically where some actual elbow-rubbing is possible—were in short shrift this year. Beach clubs were thumping with regular Cannes visitors, not guarded by iPad-carrying junior publicists fending off desperate people in formalwear. The more casual parties I did go to—all outdoors—were actually pretty lovely, sedate and conversational and even cozy.

Still, the party scene is only a secondary metric to measure a successful—or, at least, “normal”—Cannes. The movies, of course, are what take precedence, and the selection this year offered a lot to be excited about. There were bold, buzzworthy films like Julia Ducournau’s grimy, Euro-Cronenbergian Titane and Paul Verhoeven’s 17th-century nun sexfest Benedetta. Cunnilingus featured prominently in Benedetta and in many other movies here—always important to have a Cannes trend!—perhaps most notably in the opening night film, Leos Carax’s wild musical Annette. Those films produced the “you won’t believe it till you see it” chatter that sustains the festival’s intrigue, that situates Cannes as a locus of conversation in the industry and on social media.

Less audacious fare made lasting impressions too. There was the lovely ache of Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, and that of Joanna Hogg’sThe Souvenir Part II. Audiences fell for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, a three-hour adaptation of a Haruki Murakami story about grief and Chekhov. The crowd-pleaser Casablanca Beats, from Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch, played to praise, as did Asghar Farhadi’s moral thriller A Hero and Mia Hansen-Løve’s quiet, wistful Bergman Island, a film about filmmaking and film watching.

There was a fitting amount of metanarrative in this year’s lineup, artists taking stock of themselves and their passions, and we in the audience thinking about our own—all of us ruminating on the shared mad conviction that brought us here when we probably should have waited another year. It was somehow both a pensive and a frenzied Cannes, a reflection of the COVID era’s mix of stasis and persistent alarm.

Hollywood brought some of its wares overseas, showing off the latest from Wes Anderson, The French Dispatch, and Tom McCarthy’s new film Stillwater, which opens in the States later this month. I went in hoping to rekindle my long dormant romance with Anderson and skeptical about Stillwater, which looked like a strangely timed story about a good old boy giving foreigners the what-for. The French Dispatch sadly pushed me further away from Anderson and all his self-regarding pretensions; while Stillwater proved an odd and fascinating allegory about American geopolitical bungles. Stillwater, starring a wholly compelling Matt Damon, very much felt like a Cannes movie—long, rambling, probing, unexpected—albeit one from a major American studio.

The French Dispatch did, at least, allow for a viral photo op moment, with Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Timothée Chalamet, and Anderson all sporting distinctive looks during their morning photo-call. That photo is usually taken before a film’s press conference, but The French Dispatch team opted out of that ritual, the rumor being that they didn’t want to field questions about longtime Anderson collaborator Scott Rudin. I didn’t care for The French Dispatch, but at least it allowed for some Cannes imagery to spread across the digital world; it was good P.R. for a festival that needs it.

This year I felt more frustrated than usual with the arbitrary rules and fussiness of the festival—the opacity of its staff, the snootiness of its gatekeeping. The introduction of an online ticketing system for press badge holders—done as a COVID safety measure to prevent prescreening lines and crowding—did, at least, wind up leveling the playing field for those hoping to get into films. The color of your press badge barely mattered this year; an old hierarchy was demolished, hopefully never to be rebuilt. Cannes can change, can evolve, even if it’s accidental.

There were moments this year—not when I was actually sitting and watching movies, but when I was doing everything else—when I found myself thinking that this was it. That I’d never come back to Cannes, even when there isn’t a pandemic. The festival can be so unwelcoming, so difficult to maneuver, so lonely. What is the point of it all, really? On a particularly terrible night, I got myself locked out of my Airbnb and had to find temporary lodging at some dodgy motel outside of town. Still in my tuxedo from that night’s event, I wondered how the hell I’d ended up there—at that motel, at Cannes, in France. It was a strange little dip outside the bubble, a reminder that life is just churning away like normal-ish outside the ridiculous furnace of the Croisette.

When I returned to the festival area the next day—finally able to get into my apartment and change out of my now very rumpled suit—I realized how elated I was to be back. Because I could shower and put on clean clothes and access crucial stuff like my passport, but also because I’d missed the peculiar magic of the festival, even when away from it for just a night.

After all that has happened—all that is still happening—Cannes still managed moments when it felt vital. It was capable of turning former porn actor and MTV VJ Simon Rex into an art house star after just one screening of Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. It showed thousands of film fans things they’d never seen, like a 57-year-old woman playing a 12-year-old Céline Dion stand-in in the sorta biopic Aline; or an Afrofuturist sci-fi musical like Neptune Frost. Its films provoked catharsis and relief, revulsion and titillation, self-reflection and curiosity about life well beyond ourselves.

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