Competitive Edges2 min read

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The central question of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which made headlines for banning selfies and reportedly insisting that women wear high heels at evening galas, was one of inclusion and exclusion. In other words: What does and doesn’t belong on this hallowed red carpet?

The nucleus of Cannes has always been its official competition, a closely watched shortlist of twenty or so titles that compete for the prestigious Palme d’Or. An annual snapshot of the state of the art, this is historically where the firmament of world cinema is established. The competition consumes the festival’s media oxygen and dictates the schedules of most festivalgoers. Competing titles are guaranteed press conferences and reviews in the daily trade publications. They are also granted the defining accolade of the Cannes red carpet, a ceremonial black-tie walk past the throng of photographers and celebrity rubberneckers up the steps of the Grand Theatre Lumiere. It is along that same carpet, scuffed and stained in the harsh morning light, that the sleep-deprived, lanyard-clad festival proletariat scramble en route to 8:30 AM press screenings of many of those films. The competition, in short, is synonymous with Cannes. But this may well go down as an edition in which a recurrent observation of recent years took hold as an indisputable fact: The competition is not the be-all and end-all of Cannes, and to treat it as such does a disservice to the most significant films in the festival.

This year’s official selection, widely and correctly dismissed as lackluster, included the usual pantheon auteurs, a few new names, and many red-carpet-ready movie stars. But the omissions became even more glaring when the Directors’ Fortnight, the parallel event down the Croisette founded in the wake of the 1968 shutdown, made a show of poaching titles known to have been rejected by the main festival. (These included Philippe Garrel‘s generally liked In the Shadow of Women and Arnaud Desplechin‘s near-universally loved My Golden Years, which failed to make the cut for a nineteen-title competition that included five French films.) But if the core selection left much to be desired, the festival as a whole offered some truly memorable high points. By my count, there were no fewer than three extraordinary films: Cemetery of Splendour, Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s first feature since his surprise Palme d’Or for 2010’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives; Miguel Gomes‘s three-volume, six-hour-plus Arabian Nights, each part premiering on alternate days, a Scheherazade-like exercise in deferred gratification; and the Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien’s reinvention of the martial-arts genre, The Assassin, his first film in eight years. Of these three-works so rich, and richly pleasurable, that I opted to expend precious festival time on repeat viewings of each-only one, The Assassin, showed in the competition.

Read the full article here >> Via Artforum

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