The 76th Cannes International Film Festival (review)

Reviewed by: The 76 thCannes International Film Festival Codruța Morari The 76 thCannes International Film Festival, 16–2705 2023. < www.festivalcannes.com> New leadership, same old Cannes. New festival president Iris Knobloch beamed on the Croisette, as the 76th Cannes International Film Festival hosted the usual suspects. The impressive list of established auteurs, Cannes regulars, and legacies from the parallel sections delivered a good vintage in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, the expected glamour on the red carpet, and just enough controversy to keep the festival in the cultural spotlight, even after the awards ceremony. During one of the most tumultuous summers in French political life since May 1968 when the festival was famously cancelled in solidarity with the strikers, the festival organizers proscribed political expression, despite the threat of a power cut by the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). The occasional protesters of Russia's invasion in Ukraine were escorted from the red carpet amidst flashing paparazzi cameras, and both the failure of the #MeToo movement in French cinema and President Emmanuel Macron's pension reform were cautiously muted. Until the awards ceremony. Just the third woman in the festival's history to reap the acclaimed award, French filmmaker Justine Triet accepted the prize with a fiery political speech, slamming the French government and assailing the oppressive politics at work in all spheres of the nation's society, including the film industry. Stressing the increased commodification of culture and the breaking down of the French model of exception culturelle, Triet's words prompted major political and cultural figures to argue about the economic and aesthetic stakes of art cinema. The debates overshadowed the powerful achievement of the film itself, Anatomie d'une chute, which many festival critics considered the righteous winner. The record presence of seven women directors among the twenty-one competition entries did not abate criticism about Cannes's position on gender equality and sexual harassment in the industry. The choice of Maïwenn's Jeanne du Barryas the festival's opening film—a contrite story about a Versailles courtesan in a cacophonic mise-en-scène of location shots starring Johnny Depp as Louis XV—constituted an early faux pas. The controversy surrounded other competition French entries. Catherine Corsini's delicate family drama about race and class dynamics, Le retour, sparked speculation regarding safety on the set (no complaints were legally filed). As for Catherine Breillat, who returned to Cannes after a thirteen-year hiatus with L'été dernier, her portrayal of a middle-aged lawyer's passionate affair with her seventeen-year-old stepson overindulges in close-ups of her characters' sexual arousal. Slated on the second-to-last day of the festival, the provocative film escaped the jury's attention and further controversy. Among the productions that earned recognition, La passion de Dodin Bouffantby the French-Vietnamese Tran Anh Hùng took home the prize for the mise-en-scène. This deceptively understated film about 19 th-century French gastronomy [End Page 175]points to contemporary Asian cinemas that foreground food in cultural history, and reassesses the place of a very modest dish, the pot-au-feu, in the hierarchy of French culinary tradition. Its political stakes in doing so stand in contrast with the general tendency of Competition narratives to tiptoe around crucial questions. Indeed, the political was almost absent in the official entries, with the notable exceptions of Jonathan Glazer's Grand Prix winner, The Zone of Interest, and Wang Bing's documentary, Spring/Youth, a scathing representation of labor exploitation in the Chinese textile manufacturing. Perhaps the most underrated feature in competition was Les filles d'Olfaby the Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, Œil d'Orfor "the best documentary." Based on the true story of Olfa Hamrouni (playing herself), mother of four daughters whose two eldest join the Islamic State in Libya, this is filmmaking at its most creative, political, and empowering in its formal interplay between fiction and documentary. Half of Cannes's sidebar experimental section Un Certain Regardwas made of first films, a third by women filmmakers. The selection brought the usual geographical diversity...