Cannes 2019

The pace and amount of change battering down not only the doors of Cannes but cinema as a whole, especially as it relates to production, distribution, and issues of diversity—all of this, of course, ramifications of external, global changes—means that comparing the make-up of the present festival to, say, five years past is a task best left to historians as opposed to critics; we little zombies have a hard enough time keeping up from one day to the next. And Cannes is doing its best to help us forget: we are living in a new era of openness, with steps being taken to get to 50/50, including a woman literally at the top of the Lumière steps for the marche, and the festival actually announcing the members of the festival selection committee on their website. (I even met one this year, and he doesn’t even drink!) Although it might seem counterintuitive in such times of change (which are inherently confusing), critics largely prefer things that are safe—which, when it comes to most Cannes films, constitutes that tired epithet “return to form,” namely veteran filmmakers delivering on their promises. Even if this were in fact true, and pretty much in most cases it wasn’t—I’m looking at you Terrence Malick, and your return to Form (if not FORM)—what does this say about what a film community generally is looking for?

In other words, for many people the 72nd edition of Festival de Cannes presented by Arte was what Cannoises like to call a “vintage year”—and, sure, it was, in the sense that too many evenings were spent having last rounds at the wine bar called “Le Vintage.” But, jokes aside, Cannes did in fact return to form this year with a more consistent Competition; this much at—whatever “Rohmerian” touch might have been attempted by the filmmaking was buried beneath some truly painful dialogue. If my energy just wasn’t there to take in the last few films, including the perfectly penultimately planned Kechiche tubthumpathon, I’ll chock it up to the zombification of the (festival) world as a whole. By the end, the entirety of Cannes seemed as filled by the walking dead as Jim Jarmusch’s one-note, absurdly star-studded opener , a film well forgotten by the end of the Fortnight and one we will not be talking about any more, zombies be gone! Because, as a metaphor for Cannes—especially a Cannes where zombies (or zombis) appeared in far too many films—zombies are, Tourneur, just just too easy to walk with. (And on this note, RIP Roky Erickson.)