Agnes Varda is ubiquitous in Cannes. The bright orange, sunlit poster of the 2019 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, intended as an homage to the ‘only female director of the French new wave’, dots every other shop and restaurant, besides looming large at the festival venues and the beach front parties. It features her, all of 26, absorbed in the camera, perched atop a technician, while shooting her first film, La Pointe Courte.
Varda, trying to go all the way up, reaching for the skies, encompasses the two big buzzwords when it comes to Cannes’ engagement with cinema this year — Gender and Youth. There’s been an entire range of films that has been about ‘filming all the faces of youth, their commitments, their music, the places they live in, their rage for life and their questioning of the world’. Similarly much has also already been written (and will be talked about in the future as well) about the representation of women at the festival.
However, it’s the films at the intersection of the two watchwords — made by young women and competing for the first film Camera D’Or — that acquire special significance and interest.
Gender & Youth
Monia Chokri’s A Brother’s Life, a hilarious and often hysterical look at the bond between a 35-year-old woman and her brother that gets tested when he falls in love. Danielle Lessovitz’s Port Authority puts the love between a man and a trans woman under the scanner. Maryam Touzani’s Adam is about an unforseen bond between a single mother and a young pregnant woman she gives shelter to. Mounia Meddour’s Papicha is about a young teenager trying to lead a normal life in conservative Algeria and realising her dream of becoming a fashion designer. Set in the rodeo circuit, Annie Silverstein’s Bull is about the bond between a rebellious teenager and an ageing bullfighter and Pippa Bianco’s Share has another teenager at its core — one who trying to come to terms with a disturbing video featuring her.
- The jury is still out on who put the best foot forward on the red carpet in the first few days of the festival. Was it Selena Gomez in Louis Vuitton or Elle Fanning in Gucci and Valentino? Or Julianne More in Dior? Between Priyanka Chopra in black and Deepika Padukone gift wrapped in white, it was TV actress Hina Khan who made a surprise splash for India in silver. Meanwhile, China had a bigger red carpet problem to deal with. Actor Shi Yanfei caught attention for a wrong reason: staying on too long on the red carpet. Amongst the dangerously clad were singer Rita Oa in a gown with a precarious top. And Eva Longoria’s gown had to fight a tough battle with the naughty and unusually strong sea breeze.
Politics
Politics is one of the other words that feature prominently in the Cannes film official selection dictionary this year. That’s the way art has been and will be, it has to ask questions about the society, said General Delegate of Cannes, Thierry Fremaux while underlining that it’s not the festival but the artistes who are political.
Politics encompasses issues of nationality identity. So in La Cordillera de los sueños, Patricio Guzmán goes into a historical inquiry into the past, present and future of his country, Chile. French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche returns to Cannes to compete for the Palme D’Or with his portrait of the French youth in the 90s in Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo. Actor Gael García Bernal’s second film Chicuarotes is a homage of sorts to Mexico, its society and people, through the story of two teenagers.
Ken Loach’s politics in Sorry We Missed You is about new models of economy impacting the lives of ordinary mortals. Often politics gets linked to identities, riding on immigration and religion, that get hyphenated and leave the individuals conflicted, internally and in the world outside. As in Dardenne Brothers Young Ahmed where a young boy growing up in Belgium tries to balance the imam’s diktat’s with the pressures from peers.
When it comes to politics there are various contentious contemporary issues under the scanner. Ice on Fire, a hard-hitting documentary on climate change by Leila Conners is presented by none other than Leonardo DiCaprio.
5B by Dan Krauss invokes the number and letter used to designate a ward at San Francisco General Hospital in the 1980s, the first in the country to treat patients with AIDS. It is about the caregivers of these patients.
Romance
Romance comes laden with nostalgia, and, in Cannes 2019, for filmmaking itself. Quentin Taratino pays homage to the Hollywood he grew up with in Once Upon A Time… Hollywood. Jim Jarmusch goes self reflexive on filmmaking in the zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die and Pedro Almodovar’s Pain and Glory is a journey back into the life of a filmmaker.