It would be convenient if all the films that showed at the 74th Cannes Film Festival from July 6-17 could nestle together into a tidy box labeled “the new post-COVID cinema,” but the generalization won’t stick. For one thing, a good number of the feature-length releases that played here (The French Dispatch, Benedetta) were finished before the pandemic started and have been sitting on ice with distributors for a year. Others (especially many short films, like the ones in The Year of the Everlasting Storm) were shot under quarantine conditions, and include its realities. But the festival as a whole, after postponing in 2020, was conducted under the strong sign of rebirth, not as a eulogy for lost time. The ubiquitous festival president Thierry Frémaux’s opening remarks to films rarely invoked the struggles or uncertainties of this past year, nor did he speculate much publicly on what the future of moviegoing may look like. His speeches, in a mix of French and English, were celebrations of the present. The goal of the festival, he told Variety in May, would be to “host a grand Cannes—without assuming that the pandemic is over.” The pandemic is far from over, but in the meantime, here are ten of the movies that made it a grand Cannes indeed.
The French Dispatch If you don’t care for Wes Anderson’s whole deal, this one won’t convince you. The foreign correspondence desk of a bucolic American newspaper recites the contents of its farewell issue. But what if I told you that a great deal of the shots in it are symmetrical? You know what you’re in for, and it’s either going to flatten you with joy, as it did me, or it won’t. I will say that, watching the entirety of the enormous credits—conservatively, a thousand names—I was forced to reflect that the hundreds of throwaway sight gags I’d just seen involved an amount of congealed human labor comparable to that of the pyramids. Got to respect that.
The Worst Person in the World (Verdens Verste Menneske) Renate Reinsve won Best Performance by an Actress for this role, and rightly so. Joachim Trier’s episodic portrait of non-committal Norwegian basket case Julie in 12 “chapters” is an instant turning-30-and-making-a-lot-of-really-bad-life-decisions-in-a-row classic, one of the crucial genres. The relationship with vulgar cartoonist Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) reaches a way more shattering crescendo than the rest of the movie’s occasionally saccharine light touch prepares you for. Reinsve is masterful as Julie, throwing light on every facet of the art of being a total mess.
