A Lackluster Cannes and Not Just for the Extra Security

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/24/movies/cannes-film-festival-the-florida-project-hit.html

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CANNES, France — Will Smith and Jessica Chastain were there, as were Oliver Stone, Guillermo del Toro and Roman Polanski. On Tuesday, the Cannes Film Festival gave itself a 70th birthday party and filled its red carpet with stars and auteurs. The beautiful people smiled, the throngs cheered, and the guards scanned the scene while the national police with machine guns stood by — a grim image that has become a new symbol of the world’s most famous ode to cinema.

The festival has tried to put on a celebratory good show, with all its customary soignée flair and poise, but an underlying unease has settled in here. The crowds are visibly thinner in the streets bordering the festival headquarters and inside the press screenings. Security had already been intense before news came in about the ghastly attack in Manchester, England. The festival observed a memorial minute of silence Tuesday afternoon but otherwise proceeded as before. And so did attendees like me, passing through security checks before watching and, if we were lucky, losing ourselves in movies.

That has been particularly difficult this year, for reasons having nothing to do with what’s happening beyond the festival. With few exceptions, the titles in the main selection have been disappointing at best, moribund at worst. It’s baffling that Jacques Doillon’s “Rodin” was granted one of the main-competition slots. A handsomely mounted waxworks, it might have made sense as an out-of-competition attraction, good for its red-carpet value and that’s about it. The best that can be said of it is that its title subject — a male genius who uses and abuses women, some with very contemporary-looking bikini waxing — makes a fitting film-industry allegory.

As Jada Yuan of New York magazine observed, only a smattering of female filmmakers were part of the 70th anniversary event. Jane Campion is the only one to have won the Palme d’Or; in 2015, the festival awarded an honorary Palme to Agnès Varda, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave. Ms. Varda’s latest, “Faces Places” — directed with the visual artist JR — is here, and for some reason playing out of competition. It’s an exquisite, achingly moving nonfiction ramble on memory and history, cats and goats, in which JR and Ms. Varda, a vigorous 88, wander from one French hamlet to the next while rummaging through the past, summoning up old loves and searching for lost friends.

The generosity and pleasures of “Faces Places” were a welcome relief, particularly given some of the more punishing titles. The unsurprisingly excellent Isabelle Huppert helps lighten Michael Haneke’s “Happy End,” yet another of his movies about the rot and wretchedness of the bourgeoisie. Ms. Huppert plays the powerhouse figure in a multigenerational family that’s falling apart, a dominatrix role she imbues with moments of delectable offbeat comedy. Mr. Haneke’s greatness as a filmmaker is never in question during this immaculately directed work, but his emphasis again on surveillance culture, class pathology and anomie feels more ritualistic than inspired.

A few other filmmakers appear to be trying to make their own Haneke movie, including Ruben Ostlund (“The Square”) and Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Killing of a Sacred Deer”). Both films concern conveniently witless members of the upper-middle class — a Swedish museum curator in “The Square,” an apparently American heart surgeon and his family in “Sacred Deer” — whose privilege begets a crucible of suffering. Mr. Ostlund takes too long to get to his point, but there’s genuine playfulness amid his finger-wagging that makes the lessons more bearable than they are in “Sacred Deer,” which stars Colin Farrell as the surgeon and Nicole Kidman as his wife.

Both “The Workshop” and “Beats Per Minute” are heartfelt, deeply political talkathons from France. In “The Workshop,” the director Laurent Cantet again focuses on a group of diverse students grappling with questions of national identity — and terrorism — a topic he tackled in “The Class,” which won him the Palme in 2008. Although Robin Campillo’s “Beats Per Minute” centers on Act Up activists struggling against government apathy and corporate intransigence in the early 1990s, the movie’s intricate negotiation of gender issues, the complexities of identity and the necessity of resistance make up for the story’s frustrating bagginess.

Two of the most enjoyable films I’ve seen are from South Korean directors, including “Okja,” a pleasurably rambunctious, insistently political adventure from Bong Joon Ho. A sensational Tilda Swinton — leading with mad eyes and jutting teeth — stars as a corporate evildoer who tries to come between a fearless girl (a terrific An Seo Hyun) and her best friend, a genetically produced super-pig whom the baddies want to turn into meat. The considerably more modest “The Day After,” from Hong Sang-soo, is a lovely, intricately fractured story — past and present seamlessly slip into each other — about a publisher who repeats the same mistakes with different women.

One of the best films playing at Cannes isn’t in the official selection, but in Directors’ Fortnight, a separate program that runs concurrently with the main event. The glorious, gorgeous “The Florida Project,” directed by Sean Baker, had its premiere on Tuesday and rapidly became one of the most talked-about titles. Set in Florida, on the outskirts of Disney World, it centers on young children living with their parents in seedy motels off the highway, the kind where sex-by-the hour transactions are as much a part of scene as palm trees and misplaced tourists.

Speaking the day after his premiere in a restaurant overlooking the beach, Mr. Baker (who shot his last movie, “Tangerine,” on an iPhone), said he was thrilled to be at Cannes but more so for his performers, a few of whom were milling about. “It obviously feels great,” he said, adding, “I’m so happy that my little actresses are here. I can’t even imagine what it must be like through the eyes of a 6-year old.”

Later, as he talked about the casting process, which included convincing adults that he wasn’t a creep off the street, one of his young stars, Brooklynn Prince, wandered over. “Are you jet-lagged?” he asked. “No,” Brooklynn said, flashing a gaptoothed smile — she was just getting started.