Once annually, the international film industry descends upon the sun-drenched shores of the French Riviera for Cannes, the world’s most prestigious film festival. This year, across “two weeks in the midday sun,” as the late American critic Roger Ebert once famously described it, Cannes was the same glamorous spectacle of film and fashion that it’s always been, though a relative absence of Hollywood studio tentpoles—and their megawatt celebrity stars—led many of those in attendance, from sales agents perusing the marketplace to freelance journalists in search of interview commissions, to declare it a more muted Cannes than other recent editions.
And, indeed, the likes of Tom Cruise—who four years ago premiered Top Gun: Maverick as a squadron of French fighter jets soared over the Palais, and who returned just last year to unveil Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning—may have sat this one out. But that was hardly an issue for members, including our team of correspondents, who feverishly soaked in the main competition by filmmakers like Pedro Almodóvar (Bitter Christmas), Hirokazu Kore-eda (Sheep in the Box), Ryusuke Hamaguchi (All of a Sudden) and Paweł Pawlikowski (Fatherland), as well as savoring sidebars that played host to equally buzzy films from breakthrough directors like Jane Schoenbrun (Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma), Jordan Firstman (Club Kid), Marie-Clementine Dusabejambo (Ben’Imana) and Arie and Chuko Esiri (Clarissa).
This year’s Cannes jury for the main competition—led by South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, who we spoke to upon first arrival—awarded the Palme d’Or to Cristian Mungiu for Fjord, a provocative moral drama. The Romanian filmmaker’s second film to win the top prize after 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), Fjord stars Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan as a deeply religious couple—newly resettled in Norway from Romania—who are subjected to scrutiny by the local judicial system after being accused of hurting their children. The fest’s runner-up Grand Prix, meanwhile, was bestowed upon Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev for Minotaur, a tense drama set in the lead-up to the Russo-Ukrainian war about a successful businessman (Dmitriy Mazurov) who learns his wife (Iris Lebedeva) has been unfaithful.
Setting aside those already-anointed competition winners, this year’s Cannes—not simply across the main competition but also in Un Certain Regard and parallel sections including Directors’ Fortnight, Critics’ Week, and ACID—revealed an embarrassment of riches to our estimable roster of regular contributors on the ground. Sublime coming-of-age dramas from promising debut feature filmmakers, transcendent new dramas by internationally acclaimed auteurs, strikingly ambitious odysseys that followed the queer experience through genres and generations, exhilarating science-fiction epics that swung for the fences—Cannes yielded all this and more.
Contributions from: Claira Curtis, Robert Daniels, Isaac Feldberg, Marya E. Gates, Ella Kemp and Iana Murray.
