British director Andrea Arnold arrives for a press conference for the film "Bird" during the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 17.ZOULERAH NORDDINE/Getty Images
A reliably punishing gathering of the film world’s supposed arthouse elite, the Festival de Cannes is nothing if not consistent. Halfway through the competition of this year’s “polemics-free” festival, one where politics are solely permitted in the films themselves, the typical tendency of the programming can be summarized by a single frame in Bird, the latest from multiple Cannes Jury Prize winner Andrea Arnold.
In Arnold’s kitchen sink meets magical realism misfire, the mise en scène is strewn with graffiti, be it on the walls of slovenly flats or a perennially shirtless Barry Keoghan’s tattooed torso. However, one sticker, plastered in an elevator, stands out: I HATE HUMANS. (In case you thought it was accidental, the phrase was subtitled in French for the locals.)
To watch the competition in Cannes means to be subjected to the worst humanity has to offer, which so far this year consists of Danish babies smashed and tossed into gutters (The Girl with the Needle), a French teenage wannabe influencer (Wild Diamond), a small-town Romanian “gayxorcism” (Three Kilometres to the End of the World), and Yorgos Lanthimos’s often excruciatingly boring anthology Kinds of Kindness – three good-looking films in one about good-looking people being nasty to other good-looking people. And we still have Paolo Sorrentino to look forward to!
Plot synopses for all films are withheld prior to their premieres, and for good reason: Though stars don’t hurt, it often takes an oh-my-god film to be elevated to the highest stage, and, in the hands of the lesser talented filmmakers, the OMG veers into WTH (what the heck). I cannot bear to even synopsize The Substance, the annual competition entry that angers me so much it makes me question whether I should change careers.
Or take former Palme winner Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, one of the early days’ best-received works –which means, in one of Cannes’s most egregiously vile trade-paper tendencies, it got the longest standing ovation.
In Audiard’s undeniably not boring and extremely trashy film, Zoe Saldaña plays a lawyer hired by a vicious Mexican cartel leader to facilitate their sex-change operation, which is performed by an Israeli doctor. Post-op, the now eponymous Emilia 180s her life to start up an NGO to track down the many disappeared victims of narco-fuelled violence, and repatriates her kids and ex-wife (Selena Gomez) from Switzerland to live alongside her in her casa, claiming to be her own long-lost aunt a la Mrs. Doubtfire. Did I mention it’s also a musical? Unfortunately, the songs lack earworms; one torturous number about vaginoplasty makes me wish Audiard or his producer had taken inspiration from Peaches.
A more fascinating representation of Cannes’s OMG-WTH comes in the year’s most anticipated film, Francis Ford Coppola’s US$120-million self-funded Megalopolis, which evokes the fall of Rome as a parallel to America’s current decay and decline.
Despite the gutter press’s attempts to bury the director and not praise him, it’s far from a Megaflopolis. Which isn’t to say Coppola has made a visionary or even a “good” film; it’s an exhausting work of (at times) experimental excess, an old man’s movie with a decidedly wonky aesthetic that sees the director throw as much as he can on screen.
A fair chunk of its 140 minutes sticks, thanks in no small part to the stars. Adam Driver gives one of his most committed performances as the visionary architect Caesar Catalina, and there’s an unforgettable I-guess-you-can-call-it sex scene between Shia LaBeouf’s cross-dressing Donald Trump surrogate Clodio Pulcher and his “Auntie Wow” (Aubrey Plaza).
Strangely, the film reminded me most of The Dark Knight, in its portrait of an alternative version of New York with heroes, villains and mobs run amok. For what it’s worth, I’ll take another Megalopolis over any equally big-budgeted DC or Marvel movie any day.
Speaking of old men, Paul Schrader confronts his mortality head-on in his adaptation of Russell Banks’s Foregone, the dying confession of a draft dodger who resettled in Montreal. By the way, the film’s called Oh, Canada: Richard Gere’s Leonard Fife is an award-winning (both Genie and Gemini!) documentary filmmaker, whose oeuvre consists of various hot-button exposés on seal clubbing, child abuse in the Catholic Church and residential schools (titled The Shame of Canada). Alas, excerpts of these works are fleeting: The bulk of the film is a convoluted confessional reflecting its protagonist’s addled state of mind, and could have benefited from a couple of Coppola’s US$120-million.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Cannes has been a showcase for the True North Strong and Free … and we still have Cronenberg to look forward to! The sounds of O Canada literally drifted in the night air as the anthem played in a loop over Schrader’s red-carpet march, and, one day later in prime Saturday evening slots, competing LOL comedies by Winnipeggers Matthew Rankin and the accounting firm of Maddin, Johnson and Johnson both saw their world premieres out of competition.
Named after the Fleetwood Mac album and with all the feels, MJJ’s political satire Rumours takes place in Germany during a G7 summit hosted by chancellor Cate Blanchett. As the polyamorous world leaders start crafting a provisional statement, things go terribly wrong. But rather than pile on the excess – the sudden appearance of a giant brain notwithstanding – Evan Johnson’s intelligently bonkers Buñuelian script privileges dialogue, and our so-called leaders spend much of their time appropriately lost in the woods.
Held together by a long-locked Roy Dupuis as Canada’s lovesick lothario prime minister, Maxime Laplace, the end result is the closest thing to an Ed Wood film that has ever played at Cannes. It’s Apocalypse Now as a flaming maple leaf fills up the screen, and Maxime concludes with a line that applies to all the filmmakers who understand the requirement of LOL-WTHing to earn such prime screenings: “It’s better to burn out than fade away.”
The Cannes Film Festival runs through May 25.
Special to The Globe and Mail