From Johnny Depp’s comeback to murdered dogs: the highs and lows of Cannes 2023
This was a return to full-strength Cannes in so many ways: the stars were back, the party queues were looong, as were the films again, unashamedly (and many of the longest were also the best). It rained for five days then shone for the next five, which is always better than the other way around, especially with many of the aforementioned whoppers screening around the first weekend.
The competition line-up might have been the strongest since 2016, when such critics’ favourites as Toni Erdmann, Paterson and Aquarius actually went away empty-handed. This year, the guessing game of what Ruben Östlund’s jury will land upon for the Palme has put Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest in presumed pole position – it will be a shock if that doesn’t win something. Inside and outside the screening venues, here come the peaks and the troughs of Cannes 2023.
Most star-struck gathering
Ten minute chitchats with laid-back Leonardo DiCaprios on hotel terraces don’t come along just every day – or not for the likes of us. After a few nights of windswept, slightly sodden beach parties for the key premieres, the champagne reception for Killers of the Flower Moon, on the first sunny afternoon, was bliss for those lucky few Anglophone journos given the golden ticket. De Niro came, as did his splendid co-star Lily Gladstone, and snaps of critics mingling with the megastars rapidly flooded Instagram. The real fillip, though? Meeting Martin Scorsese, who ever-so-modestly broke down his cameo at the end of the movie, and reeled off all his favourite Anthony Mann westerns with giddy-making delight.
Best argument for long films
No one was about to harangue Scorsese’s editor Thelma Schoonmaker (holding court at the above meet-and-greet) for the 207-minute running time of his rumbling crime epic. But Killers of the Flower Moon, which most of us loved, was in great company: both in and out of competition, the average length of the films here must surely have been the highest ever. Heavy-hitting options for Östlund’s jury include Wang Bing’s 212-minute observational doc Youth and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 197-minute About Dry Grasses, a thoroughly engrossing study of, among other things, teacher-student tensions at a school in the remote Turkish countryside. (Dry grasses only make a very late appearance.)
In other sections of the programme, the Argentinian bank robbery saga The Delinquents (180 mins), which has Dostoyefskian heft, was one of the most celebrated films in Un Certain Regard, while Cannes Classics saw a triumphant comeback from 83-year-old Victor Erice with Close Your Eyes (169 min) – so triumphant, in fact, that Erice penned an angry letter in El Pais, complaining (rightly) that he’d been excluded in an underhand way from official competition. The most stimulating, all-round-enjoyable film I caught across the whole festival was Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall – a snip at a mere 150 mins.
Least scandalous controversy
Erice’s protest was strictly inside baseball. Where were the boos, the walkouts, the unbelievably risqué sex scenes? Cannes normally loves a provocation bomb, but even the ones that started ticking this year turned out to be damp squibs. Tom Hanks snapped looking mildly irate on the red carpet? A non-story even as it happened, snatched at by tabloid editors desperate for juice, and debunked the next day.
Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer, about a mother’s affair with her teenage stepson, was expected to be a major eyebrow-raiser, but turned out tame. Todd Haynes’s May December, on a similar age-gap romance, fascinatingly dissects a tabloid scandal, but is far too artful and interesting to cause one. Catherine Corsini’s The Return was held back from selection until allegations of directorial misconduct on set were checked – evidently to the satisfaction of the programmers, since it then got in.
What else? Not much. There was a brief flurry of media attention when Brie Larson, at the jury press conference, was quizzed on her thoughts about Johnny Depp’s starring role in the opener, Jeanne du Barry – a film she didn’t technically have to watch, seeing as it was playing out of competition, so that was that. From most accounts, the only booing at the end of a screening was for the mouth-watering food porn in Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot-au-Feu – either some critics really objected to being made so hungry, or wanted to épater the bourgeoisie and/or signal their veganism. Either way, booing the “nice” films was the best anyone could do.
Best argument for a Cinematography prize
I’m frustrated most years that there’s no such award given out in Cannes – the logic presumably being that as soon as you reward one aspect of filmcraft, you really have to reward them all. But this year has seen particularly stunning achievements in that field, in pictures which may be tricky to reward in any other way – like Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s debut Banel and Adama, a glowing love story set in the Senegalese desert; the throwaway magic of Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera; Wes Anderson’s spaced-out pastelly vision for Asteroid City, which might be his best-looking film to date; and the aforementioned The Pot-au-Feu, where sumptuous shots of food prep are only the half of it: the shimmering light across its gardens and meadows is so painterly you think you’ve gone to heaven.
This is not to deny the visual glories of likely big-hitters such as About Dry Grasses, Aki Kaurismäki’s typically exquisite framing in Fallen Leaves, or the multiple-fixed-camera approach which makes Glazer’s eye on the Holocaust so singular. But if you filled this year’s Oscar field for Best Cinematography with any five of the above, it would be an all-time embarrassment of riches.
Dogpocalypse!
SPOILERS GALORE HERE, but they’re the kind that a certain category of filmgoer will be grateful for – anyone who hates falling for a dog on screen, and then sitting there helpless while the poor pooch meets a sticky end. A bewildering roster of canine co-stars have met their doom this year. Two get poisoned to death in Amat Escalante’s Mexican crime mystery Lost in the Night. Another is stoned in the Moroccan road-movie Deserts, and spends the rest of the film with a bandage on its head. An aforementioned competition title (I actually won’t spoil which) has a pivotal scene in which a beloved border collie is fed ten aspirin on purpose to see what happens – a remarkably well-acted scene, not least by the dog, but also a seriously distressing one, for which the wrangler probably deserves a special prize.
There are more. A particularly hapless pitbull terrier in the paramedic ride-along Black Flies is shot, stuffed into a fire department locker, and then has its bloodied corpse shoved in someone’s face. This brutal business all happens so early on in the film, it’s the most thankless canine cameo of the lot here. And then there’s The Old Oak, Ken Loach’s tale of a publican with a tiny guardian angel called Marra. With the mutts across the street straining at the leash to mash her up, and their owners not the kind of lads you can trust, and this being Loach, all I can say is that a golden future for Marra is not exactly guaranteed. The Palm Dog, awarded annually, went quite rightly to the aspirin victim. My suggestion that Friday’s ceremony ought to have featured an entire In Memoriam section was only briefly entertained (too sad, really). Dog lovers everywhere, choose your films with caution.
