Everything to Know About the Less-Hyped Films at Cannes
Which titles to skip, which to absolutely watch, and why many walked out of a screening of Godard par Godard during the film festival.
As attendees of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival used VPNs to watch the Succession series finale and the NBA playoffs, Lubna Playoust’s Room 999 screened at the festival—where, last year, filmmakers were asked whether there would be a future of cinema, or if we will become what Wim Wenders called “victims of the digital revolution.” Ironically, Room 999 is a remake of Wenders’s 1982 film Room 666, which used a similar static shot in one Cannes hotel room to ask filmmakers almost the same questions. Back then, the antagonists were TV, home video, and Star Wars; while now, streaming and Marvel are the foes. The futile inquiry and simple setup were better used in the earlier version, with Jean-Luc Godard attempting to watch tennis on TV while saying he likes that soap operas like Dallas have no stories. The recently deceased Godard said then of TV (which could be applied to digital devices today): “It’s not scary because it’s very close and you have to be very close to the picture. But because it’s very small, we’re not afraid of it.”
While concerns of inflation, labor, home viewing, and big-budget franchises are similar in both films, what filmmaker Audrey Diwan (among others) adequately addresses in the newer film is a crisis of attention spans. How do you shock viewers overwhelmed with a barrage of images into paying attention? Two filmmakers at Cannes this year did so with sound—and its lack. The two most formally inventive films at the festival were Jonathan Glazer’s Grand Prix award-winning Zone of Interest and Godard’s final film, the 20-minute Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars.
Jean-Luc Godard in a still from Godard Par Godard (Godard by Godard).
What was most shocking and even amusing about the Godard short were the walkouts. The short film followed a staid, traditional documentary called Godard par Godard by Florence Platarets. While audience members were happy to sit through the 60-minute shoveling of chronological information on Godard, when it came to the man’s actual recent work, they couldn’t take it. The film began with prolonged silence in a full cinema, while textural images resembling abstract painting and collage were on the enormous screen. That’s when the walkouts began. It would have made more sense for the walkouts to have been political rather than artistic in nature, but the political offenses (a “mild” joke about the Jewish character) came at the very end. As Jane Fonda said in a Cannes masterclass of her former director, Godard: “A great filmmaker. But as a man? I’m sorry. No, no.”
A still from Zone of Interest.
Glazer used sound to begin his film in an inverse way to Godard. His movie focusing on the family life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant who ran Auschwitz, began with a black screen and a heavy, haunting score by the brilliant Mica Levi. Worrisomely glib comments about Zone of Interest heard at the festival are that it “reinvents the Holocaust film.” While French filmmakers in particular (including Godard) have commented on the ethics of even depicting an atrocity like the Holocaust, whether fictionally or with archival images, does Glazer’s film create new clichés by carefully avoiding previous and traumatic ones? It is successful at a subtle critique of Auschwitz as a museum, while also capturing the timbre of devastation (such as a pile of once-trendy shoes belonging to the dead) both in the museum and in the film.
Aside from the score, what is most fascinating about Glazer’s film are the night-vision scenes of a little girl planting apples around the nearby grounds, evidently food for those who could escape. These sections are nuanced and abstract, but with the aural background of the Höss children hearing nightly fairytales, seem to capture how a child would process horrific distant screams, perceived ambient trauma, and the fictions she is being told. Another standout in the strong film is Sandra Hüller as Frau Höss, who communicates so much evil and anxiety simply by the way she walks.
Hüller gives a very different, more dialogue-driven performance in the Palme d’Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall, about an organized wife and her feckless husband, both writers, and whether she murdered him or he committed suicide. It’s another film that interestingly uses sound: this time, an enervating loop of a German steel drum band’s cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.”. The film and performances are compelling; overall, it feels like a more concise version of a prestige drama like Succession.
A still from Anatomy of a Fall.
In Room 999, last year’s Palme d’Or winner Ruben Östlund appears in Birkenstocks, shorts, and a linen shirt open at the chest to say that the phenomenon of films curated by algorithms instead of humans is lowering our collective standards. “Because I don’t think we can trust our own taste,” he said. Perhaps this is also true of the 2023 Cannes jury he presided over ,which failed to give a single prize to what I believe was the best film at Cannes, Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera.
La Chimera stars the charismatic Josh O’Connor in a soulful performance as an English widower in 1980s Italy who is part of a band of grave robbers, stealing antiquities to sell on the black market. Isabella Rossellini, Rohrwacher’s sister Alba, and less-known actors including Lou Roy Lecollinet all give charmingly idiosyncratic performances in a space crevice exactly between real life and a poetic, imaginary world. It does what cinema can and should do. The film about rituals, institutions, and the space between life and death is similar in theme to what Rohrwacher herself says at the end of Room 999, in perhaps the best non-answer to a non-question: “You might say that if [cinema] were dying, the fact that it can die isn’t necessarily a negative thing. It makes it more human...more similar to life, because it’s fragile and this art form was necessary. And then it will die.”
