The 77th Cannes Film Festival came to a close this weekend with the passing of the cinematic torch definitively from the old generation to the next. When Barbie director Greta Gerwig, as President of the Jury, announced the Palme d’Or to Sean Baker’s New York-set sex worker comedy Anora, it felt like a coming-of-age moment.
Earlier in the evening, George Lucas had received an honorary Palme d’Or from his good friend and brother-by-another mother Francis Ford Coppola. No one watching at the Grand Lumière could help but be touched. But anyone who had seen Megalopolis, Coppola’s latest film earlier in the festival, also sighed in relief that the film had been quietly forgotten. The passion project was a mess that defied criticism. Essentially six or seven different films – only two of which were good – Megalopolis is an epic that views like a Shakespearean rendition of Ayn Rand via Ancient Rome and 1950s noir. That sounds a lot better than what we get but there’s a very good chance it will be reassessed as a cult classic – in the manner of Southland Tales, another film which is (whisper it) “not good”.
Other old masters present included Paul Schrader, whose meditation on the dying of the light, Oh Canada, stars Richard Gere as a documentarian giving his last confessional interview. Schrader once gave a crudely anatomical criticism of a Terrence Malick film (“the unwanted urine that dribbles from an old man’s penis”), which could now be applied to his own films if one were feeling Schrader-ish and cruel. Meditations on death dominated David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds but didn’t set the festival afire. The exception was Jacques Audiard and his narco-musical Emilia Perez, which picked up a Jury Award as well as the Best Actress prize for the female ensemble of Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Karla Sofía Gascón. It is a film which doesn’t take age or death as its subject, and fully embraces more topical subjects such as transsexuality and drug trafficking: though, how deeply these subjects are explored is more open to debate.
One highlight of the festival came halfway through the programme with the utterly bonkers bloodbath of The Substance. Revenge director Coralie Fargeat’s second feature stars Debbie Moore as an aging (in Hollywood years) former star who submits to a procedure which will create a younger double of herself, played by Margaret Qualley. It’s a feminist rewriting of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, via the extremes of Stuart Gordon or early Peter Jackson. Many were appalled; most were delighted and it picked up recognition for its screenplay – a slightly perplexing choice given how viscerally visual the film is.
Another jury prize went to the film with the most compelling narrative around its festival presentation. Dissident Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof completed The Seed of the Sacred Fig in secret as he was already undergoing trial for his previous films – which were accused of spreading anti-regime criticism. He was sentenced to eight years in prison and flogging but managed to flee Iran, and his arrival at the premiere of his film was greeted with a five-minute standing ovation before a second of the film had unspooled. He held up photographs of absent cast members as members of the audience shouted supportive chants in Persian and English.
Rasoulof’s latest film is his most mature work, a genre-shifting portrait of a family torn apart by the Hijab protests, their violent suppression and the work of the father as a prosecuting judge for the regime. Psychological drama and social realism mixes with satire and even at one point a chase movie. All these tonal shifts cohere into a satisfying artistic whole and the film is a genuinely profound statement on Iran and its extreme patriarchy. It was rightly awarded the Special Jury Award and will undoubtedly find international distribution to elevate Rasoulof’s already solid reputation.
Three women dominate Rosoulof’s film and another female trio mounted the stage with their director Payal Kapadia to receive the Gran Prix for All The Light We Imagine, a Mumbai-set drama about love finding space to exist and crossing lines of religion and class. It was shockingly the first Indian film to enter competition in thirty years. Kapadia gave one of the best speeches of the evening dedicating her award also to those who work behind the scenes at the festival itself and who are in an ongoing pay dispute with the organizers. It was typically farseeing and enacted the intersectional politics that is too often just a buzz word.
In a competition dominated by female themes and voices, it was fitting that the Best Actor Award – Jesse Plemons for his triptych of roles in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness – passed by almost unnoticed, with Plemons not present to accept the award. Which brings us back to Sean Baker’s Anora, a film dominated by Mikey Madison’s gutsy role as a New York stripper who marries a Russian playboy much to the violent opposition of his oligarch family. The adjectives to describe her can quickly sound like cliches of female portraiture: feisty? zesty? fierce? The sex worker with the heart of gold? But Madison, who has previously appeared in Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood and Scream, turns Ani into a complete woman whose self-knowledge is way ahead of any box you might be trying to stuff her in. Her moxie and determination, her force of character and humour ask for neither sympathy nor acceptance and end up winning both.
Baker, along with his usual team of collaborators – including producer and life partner Samantha Quan – take sex work both seriously and humorously, and essentially on its own terms. This is an extremely funny film, taking much of its energy from classic screwball comedy beats but in a milieu usually the reserve of misery porn ‘realism’. Ani might be geographically a thousand miles away from the daughters of The Seed of the Sacred Fig, but ultimately it comes down to the same three realities: women, life, freedom.
The 77th Cannes Film Festival takes place from 15-26 May. Follow our coverage here.
John Bleasdale | @drjonty
