The race for the Palme d’Or remains very open in Cannes, where the Festival enters its second week with a series of prestigious directors on the program, including the already palmed Wim Wenders, Nanni Moretti and Ken Loach.
The glamor will not be outdone: Monday, pop superstar The Weeknd and actress Lily-Rose Depp, daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis, are announced on the red carpet. They hold the main roles of The Idol, a highly anticipated series from Euphoria director Sam Levinson, the first two episodes of which will be shown in world premiere on the Croisette. On the competition side, the jury, which has already been able to see 11 of the 21 films in the running, is about to discover Club Zero, by the Austrian Jessica Hausner and The Dead Leaves by the Finnish Aki Kaurismaki.
The games remain very open to succeed Without Filter, the squeaky comedy on capitalism delivered last year by the Swede Ruben Östlund. The latter is the president of the jury for this 76th edition, accompanied in particular by the actress Brie Larson (Captain Marvel), the writer Atiq Rahimi or the American actor Paul Dano.
Among the feature films that have made the greatest impression, The Zone of Interest by British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer is the most chilling: it plunged festival-goers into the “banality of evil” by retracing daily life with the seemingly tranquil appearances of the commandant of the Auschwitz extermination camp, Rudolph Höss, and his family. The Chinese Wang Bing with Youth (Spring), his monumental 3:32 fresco alongside migrant workers in factories in China, was also hailed for his ambition.
In a completely different genre, much lighter, the American Todd Haynes is one of the darlings of international critics with May December, a murky game of mirrors on the pretenses between two superstars, Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman.
On the performance side, the German Sandra Hüller has twice impressed Cannes: as the wife of Rudolph Höss in The Zone of Interest and as a widow accused of having killed her husband in Anatomy of a fall, the film of the one of the French directors in competition (Justine Triet). Only one film was unanimous against him: Black Flies, by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, a thriller closer to New York paramedics, starring Tye Sheridan and Sean Penn, but considered heavy and full of clichés.
After a first straight line marked by the out-of-competition presentation of event films, including the return of Harrison Ford in the latest Indiana Jones and the new Martin Scorsese with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, ten films will still try their luck for the Palme . Among them, three already awarded directors: the German Wim Wenders, the Italian Nanni Moretti and the British king of social chronicle Ken Loach, who will even try to be the first to win a third historic Palme, after The Wind rises (2006) and I, Daniel Blake (2016).
The return of French director Catherine Breillat is also eagerly awaited, as is the star cast of the latest Wes Anderson, who promises to make flashes crackle on the carpet with Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton or Margot Robbie. The winners are expected on Saturday evening.
