The Cannes Festival is back with great success: Leos Carax’s opening film “Annette” and other competition films by François Ozon and Nadav Lapid.
Imagine it’s cinema again and the hall is full. Even if it was mandatory to wear a mask at the opening gala in Cannes on Tuesday evening, it was almost like a picture from the old days. In any case, the hall cameras couldn’t get enough of a bird’s eye view of the jam-packed auditorium.
But the real eye-catcher was Leos Carax, the controversial maverick of French auteur films, when the lights came on again. In the midst of the standing, applauding audience, he treated himself to a cigarette, only to pass it casually to the main actor Adam Driver.
With his musical “Annette”, he brought Cannes program director Thierry Frémaux what is probably the most coveted rarity in the international festival business – the perfect opening film: great cinema every moment, drunk with the legacy of old Hollywood and its luxurious screen magic. But at the same time allergic to sugar sauce: The unequal love story of a comedian who is celebrated for his sarcasm (Adam Driver) and an ethereal angelic chanteuse (Marion Cotillard) tastes more like chocolate that has been sprinkled with pepper.
Told in original songs by the British glam rock veterans by the duo Sparks, the drama only gets going after the heroine’s tragic death: their daughter turns out to be a miracle baby in whom not only the singing talent, but also the restless spirit of revenge of the mother lives on. Represented by hand puppets and marionettes, this figure is ideal for Carax’s seductive and prickly anti-naturalism.
Supported by the Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen, where parts of the film set in Los Angeles were shot, “Annette” is the product of years of preparation. As early as 1999, in one of his rare interviews, Carax told us about the plan to pay homage to King Vidor’s silent film “A Man of the Masses”, which is only now actually woven into this film. He wants to make a love film like this, which only begins after the end title, when the lovers have found each other.
At that time, however, Carax felt completely misunderstood in his home country: “The further away you go from home, the lower the false expectations. There you take the films as a riddle that you have to decipher. In their own country people pay and believe that the film is theirs now and that they have the right to expect something specific from it. They expect to be told what kind of reality they are dealing with, and that is what my films don’t. That’s why I think they are doing so badly in France. ”This triumph at Cannes was now something of a belated acceptance into the sanctuary of French film culture.
So someone else may feel all the more firmly in the saddle of the local film industry: 53-year-old François Ozon can compete with his idol Rainer Werner Fassbinder in terms of productivity. His penultimate film, the gay coming-of-age story “Sommer 85”, celebrates its German theatrical release just this week. Ozone, in particular, its realistic substances are becoming ever easier to move. “Tout s’est bien passé” (“Everything Went Fine”), as a filmed case study about self-determined death, would easily have degenerated into a didactic piece.
Indeed, Ozon approaches the memories of the daughter of a man who no longer wants to live with compelling vibrancy. Sophie Marceau succeeds in the female lead, perhaps the most mature achievement of her career. The complexity of the conflicts should actually make her role as heavy as lead: Despite a traumatic childhood, she first opposes the father’s wish to die, only to then want to fulfill him out of love. But how should she behave when he seems to be enjoying his life again despite his declared intention? It is a small film that barely reaches for a golden palm, but splendidly fulfills everything it sets out to do.
And the first day of the festival has a third type of cinema, for which Cannes was once famous, to offer: the agitative political drama in the tradition of early Godard. The Israeli contribution “Ha’Berech” (“Ahed’s Knee”) by Nadav Lapid is a razor-sharp account of the reality of political censorship in cultural politics. The choreographer Avshalom Pollak plays the main role of a director who is supposed to show a film in a small island in the desert. On site, he is supposed to sign a declaration that only certain issues that are relevant to the state are mentioned. Lapid processes an experience from 2018 here; in fact, this is how the Ministry of Culture exercises censorship.
The winner of the Golden Berlinale Bear 2019 for “Synonymes” stages the director’s escalating dispute with the local library manager as a verbal war film, as a choreography of words. Concretely as well as metaphorically, he succeeds in achieving an astonishing generality: without losing sight of the reality of the political situation in Israel, his film can also be transferred to the threatened democracies in Hungary or the Czech Republic. The only conciliatory thing about it is the credits: as long as the Israeli Film Fund supports such a critical work, the battle is not lost.
