CANNES, France — We came, we saw, we cheered and, as you may have heard, we also jeered. In other words, welcome to the latest edition of the Cannes Film Festival, which ends Sunday. For more than a week, thousands of journalists and industry insiders have swarmed into this Riviera city to sift through titles that will be coming to a theater near you or just your favorite small screen. Inside the festival headquarters, journalists have raced from screening to screening while, at the film market, business types have bought and sold movies and sometimes projects that no critic has seen nor may ever want to, like “I Am Wrath,” a revenge flick set to star a gun-toting John Travolta.
The critics haven’t been packing, thankfully; we can scarcely smuggle a croissant past the headquarters guards, who check our bags and wand us electronically. Instead, we have made do with poison pens and iPads. Critics like to be wowed at Cannes, after all, and have volubly complained that there haven’t been many occasions for that. Even so, much depends on where you’ve looked, and outside the main competition it has been possible to see satisfying movies from around the globe, including two ruminant tales: Grimur Hakonarson’s “Rams,” a story of Icelandic sheepherders that flirts with comedy and deepens into tragedy; and Yared Zeleke’s “Lamb,” a modest, touching Ethiopian drama about an intrepid Jewish boy and his pet sheep that introduces you to characters defined by more than the daily struggles to feed themselves.
Even in the oft-lambasted main competition there was plenty to chew over and critics who weren’t especially excited by the very fine likes of Jacques Audiard’s “Dheepan” (from France) and Paolo Sorrentino’s “Youth” (Italy) may find that once they’re home, this year’s Cannes wasn’t that bad, after all, especially when they’re faced with reviewing another Marvel movie. Nothing if not timely, “Dheepan” follows three Sri Lankan refugees, including its title character, trying to make a home together in a dangerous French slum. The movie doesn’t cohere as beautifully as a previous Audiard Cannes entry, “A Prophet,” but, he still holds you with performances and jolts of tenderness and violence. The ending of “Dheepan,” set in a pastoral British backyard, reads as a savage critique of France’s immigration policies.
“Youth” is another carnivalesque romp from Mr. Sorrentino, once again working with English-speaking actors. Michael Caine, as a composer, and Harvey Keitel, as a film director, star as longtime friends who, while staying at an astonishingly situated Swiss spa, reflect on life, love, and death amid sagging and nubile bodies. Mr. Sorrentino’s brightly effusive visual imagination can be intoxicating; almost every scene gives something worth looking at — a mountain landscape, a beauty queen strutting about in all her glory, Mr. Caine’s wonderful face, by turns delicate and stony. But the story is too diffuse and Mr. Sorrentino’s ideas (we live, we regret, we die) are too flimsy, especially when not tethered to the glories of Rome, backdrop of his last feature, “The Great Beauty.”
“The Great Beauty” had its premiere at Cannes in 2013. That year, the main slate also included “Inside Llewyn Davis,” from Joel and Ethan Coen (back this year as the presidents of the main feature jury), Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska,” James Gray’s “The Immigrant,” Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue Is the Warmest Color” and Jia Zhang-ke’s “A Touch of Sin.” Like those movies, most if not all the titles in this year’s main competition will roll out globally, whether on big screens or only small. Yet it’s doubtful that even the highest praised selections here — including the French critical favorite “My Mother,” from the Italian director Nanni Moretti — will excite those who keep the Oscar machine running or set off the kind of passionate argument that greeted “Blue Is the Warmest Color.”
One problem, of course, is what does any festival programmer do when some of the most revered filmmakers in the world arrive here with a good movie rather than another critically anointed masterwork? Mr. Jia’s “Mountains May Depart,” which was rightfully spared jeers, is not his supreme achievement, but instead a quietly stirring, characteristically thoughtful drama that tracks several characters as they move from China’s past into its present and future. Like several other directors here this year, Mr. Jia really trips up only with his English-speaking performers. In his case, however, the use of English serves his larger narrative and political points, whereas with other directors who don’t normally work in English, it has felt like a financing compromise.
The vagaries of auteurist output aside, the festival has made baffling choices, including turning down Arnaud Desplechin’s terrific “My Golden Days,” which played in a parallel event, the Directors’ Fortnight. That was bad enough, but worse has been the chatter that Mr. Desplechin’s movie was bumped partly to make room for more commercial French films like “Dheepan” and for two female directors: Maïwenn’s monotonous soap, “My King,” and Valérie Donzelli’s “Marguerite & Julien,” an incest romance in a leadenly whimsical Wes Anderson key. It’s a problem when there are no women in the main competition, as has been the case in the past, but programming by gender instead of quality risks giving ammunition to those who think that women can’t hack it with the big-boy auteurs.
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