Vim and Vigor

T WAS AN UNFAMILIAR FEELING FOR MANY CRITICS AT CANNES: WAS THAT CONTENTMENT, or perhaps even… pleasure? Yes, there it was, a lingering smile around one week into the festival—in the immediate afterglow of and , and in the longer wake of , , , , … I could go on, and I will. Sometimes Cannes can be a question of rhythm—whether it’s the luck of several promising filmmakers being in sync with the festival, or the well-timed landing of crowd-pleasers and provocations alike at the beginning and middle—and the 72nd edition hit the sweet spot. Certainly one factor was how many auteurs steered into the pulpy appeals of genre narratives, their vividness, and their rejuvenating inborn energies. For Corneliu Porumboiu, a crime drama; for Arnaud Desplechin, a police procedural; for Quentin Tarantino,