From May 16-27, the luxury French Riviera town of Cannes will once again play host to the cream of the world’s film directors, stars and producers for the 76th edition of what is still the serious cinema universe’s most significant festival.
In 2022 it returned to normal, postpandemic business, with the winner of its coveted Palme d’Or — Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness — going on to earn three Oscar nominations. Now Cannes director Thierry Frémaux has announced a line-up for 2023 packed with some of the biggest names in world cinema.
As someone who has kept a keen eye on Cannes for more than two decades with no real possibility of actually attending the festival, and even less of a chance to see the films in competition released on SA screens, it’s a bittersweet experience to go through it. Judging purely from the list of films premiering at the festival and its main competition contenders, the state of the medium seems to be in much ruder health than doomsday prophets would lead us to believe.
The line-up includes a welcome return for filmmakers whose names have not been seen for far too long; those whose prolific output happily shows no signs of slowing down; and a healthy dose of films by new young cinematic Turks who are biting at the heels of their heroes and ensuring that the next generation of cinematic boundary pushers is in good hands.
It is also, and perhaps necessarily, not without some controversial choices providing plenty for online tongue-waggers to get their teeth into. The most notable is the first film to screen this year — the French period drama Jeanne Du Barry. Directed by French actor-director Maïwenn, it will mark the first acting outing in three years for its star Johnny Depp, whose last three years have mostly consisted of the messy and public battles with his former wife Amber Heard.
Depp plays French king Louis XV, while Maïwenn — who has been accused of assault by a French political journalist — plays the king’s lover, Jeanne Du Barry, who caused an outcry when she was moved into the palace of Versailles to live with him. Frémaux defended the film’s opening night selection, pointing out that Depp had won his legal case against Heard, had not been banned from acting and promising that his performance is “magnificent”.
The festival’s unavoidable mainstream blockbuster premiere, reserved in 2022 for Top Gun: Maverick, will go to the fifth instalment in the Indiana Jones franchise, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, starring Harrison Ford and directed by James Mangold. Like Jeanne Du Barry, Indy’s return to the cinematic jungle will be screened out of competition. Also out of competition, but hugely anticipated, is Martin Scorsese’s long-gestating 1920s drama The Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, which according to early reports clocks in at an epic 406 minutes.
Euphoria creator Sam Levinson’s potentially controversial pop-music celebrity dissection series The Idol also screens in the out-of-competition section. There will be a special screening of Turner Prize and Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen’s documentary Occupied City about the history of Amsterdam during the years of Nazi occupation.
The main competition category of the 2023 festival is the real cineaste flytrap, though. Here previous winners and darlings of the Boulevard de la Croisette make their long-awaited return to Cannes. They include British indie auteur Jonathan Glazer, whose last film was the 2013 creepy alien psycho-sexual drama Under the Skin, and whose latest is an ambitious adaptation of Martin Amis’ novel The Zone of Interest, set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
Finnish master of the dour, dry existential comedy Aki Kaurismäki brings his latest, Fallen Leaves, to Cannes in search of the Palme d’Or win that as yet has escaped him, in spite of several previous nominations and secondary wins over the years. America’s favourite quirky production design master, Wes Anderson, too is hoping that his new star-studded comedy-drama, Asteroid City, will finally earn him top honours. Japanese social critic Hirokazu Kore-eda will be on the hunt for his second Palme d’Or (after his 2018 win for Shoplifters). Italian comedian turned dramatic master Nanni Moretti, won the festival’s top prize in 2004 for his devastating tale of family suffering, The Son’s Room, and is back in the competition with The Sun of the Future, billed as a comedy-drama.
Other previous Palme d’Or winners in contention are two-time winner and British social realism pioneer Ken Loach, whose The Old Oak examines the effects of the decimation of the mining industry on a local pub; veteran German New Wave legend Wim Wenders who along with his Palme d’Or nominee Perfect Days, will show a special screening of his documentary about German painter Anselm Kiefer; and Turkish trailblazer Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose drama About Dry Grasses examines the existential angst of a small-town teacher hoping for a new posting to a school in Istanbul.
With returns for other former darlings of the festival, including French-Vietnamese cinematic poet Tran Anh Hung (The Passion of Dodin Bouffant), US queer-cinema hero Todd Haynes (May/December), French erotic daredevil Catherine Breillat (L’Ete Dernier) and Chinese video artist Wang Bing — now represented by SA’s own Goodman Gallery — there’s no shortage of films for a diverse range of tastes and interests.
This should be reason enough to motivate those who can get to Cannes to see for themselves that the 76th edition of the most reliable barometer of the seventh art continues to offer plenty of hope and promise.
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