One truism of the Cannes Film Festival is that no matter how alarming the news about the American movie world, Hollywood — however you understand that word — retains a powerful grip on this event. Cannes is a thoroughly French affair, but its love for le cinéma américain is evident everywhere from the faded images of Hollywood stars that are scattered about to the honorary awards that the event bestows. On Saturday, it will present an honorary Palme d’Or to George Lucas, the 11th American to get an award that it’s given out just 22 times.
Given the United States’ long domination of the international film market, it’s no surprise that the country looms large here. The Disney adventure “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” it is worth pointing out, was No. 1 at the box office in France and in much of the rest of the world when Cannes opened last week; it still is. That said, the hold that American cinema maintains on this festival goes beyond market share. Americans have also won more top awards at Cannes than filmmakers from Britain, Italy or France. This fact reminds me of the moment in “Kings of the Road,” the 1976 Wim Wenders road movie, when a character says, “The Yanks have colonized our subconscious.”
There are always movies from around the world here, of course, but the selections that often generate the loudest chatter are either from the United States or are Hollywood-adjacent. Three such titles this year are a heat-seeking troika that involve American notables who, after a period of relative domestic quiet, have showily returned to the international stage. Kevin Costner is here with “Horizon: An American Saga,” a baggy western that’s the first chapter in a multipart series, and Francis Ford Coppola has a new epic, “Megalopolis.” Then there’s Demi Moore, who’s being hailed for her bold starring role in “The Substance,” an English-language horror movie from the French director Coralie Fargeat.
A gross-out fantasy that suggests Fargeat has watched her share of David Cronenberg movies, “The Substance” centers on a beautiful actress, Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore), who is what’s often irritatingly called a certain age. When her TV show is canceled, the actress does what you might predict given the movie’s exaggerated look and tone: She despairs at what she sees in the mirror and reaches for an outrageous solution. This turns out to be the mysterious treatment of the title, which allows her to effectively generate (birth) a younger version of herself. This Demi 2.0, as it were, is played by Margaret Qualley, who, like Moore, bares her all in a 140-minute movie that’s as simple-minded as it is bloated.
I am (personally!) sympathetic to the points about women, beauty and age that Fargeat seems to be trying to make. Yet the movie never gets beyond the obvious, and the whole thing soon becomes grindingly repetitive despite its two vigorous lead performances, all the many eye-catching shots of Qualley pumping her butt like a piston and the chunky tsunamis of gore. Far more successful on both feminist and filmmaking terms is “Anora,” Sean Baker’s giddily ribald picaresque about a Brooklyn sex worker, Ani (Mikey Madison), who, more or less impulsively, weds the absurdly juvenile son of a Russian oligarch.
“Anora” has emerged as a critical favorite, but critics don’t hand out the top prize, the Palme d’Or. That task goes to the main competition jury, which this year includes three female filmmakers — the jury president, Greta Gerwig, the Turkish screenwriter Ebru Ceylan and the Lebanese director Nadine Labaki. I’d love to listen in on them talking about “Anora.” I also wonder how the Motion Picture Association, which provides the ratings for most movies released in the United States, will deal with it. “Anora” isn’t explicit, but when Baker’s movie opens (via Neon in the United States), his humorous, nonjudgmental attitude toward his subject — emblematized by an early shot of bouncing female butts — will continue to inspire cheers along with some tsk-tsk think pieces and ratings hand-wringing.
There have been other delights, bouncy and not, and then there’s the latest from Yorgos Lanthimos, “Kinds of Kindness.” Once again, he has joined forces with Emma Stone — they previously united on “The Favourite” and “Poor Things” — to explore the master-slave dynamic. Less visually and narratively ambitious than his recent work, “Kindness” consists of three loosely connected stories in which the same actors (including an invaluable Jesse Plemons) play different characters confronting extremes. In one tale, a man struggles to break free of his master; in another, a woman works hard to please hers. Those who find Lanthimos’s labored eccentricities and cutesy cruelty amusing will presumably like this movie, too.
I vastly preferred squirming through Cronenberg’s latest, “The Shrouds,” where at least there are some ideas to go with the ick. A tamped-down Vincent Cassel — his gray hair suggestively styled like Cronenberg’s — plays a widowed cemetery owner who has developed a surveillance technology that allows mourners to observe, via video screens attached to headstones, their dearly departed rot in their graves. More intellectually provocative than wholly satisfying, the movie nonetheless offers you much to contemplate amid its ews, including Cronenberg’s characteristically perverse take on life, death and desire. “Share memories, share life,” an old Kodak slogan ran. Not so fast, says Cronenberg.
In another American-adjacent selection in the main competition, “The Apprentice,” the Danish director Ali Abbasi dramatizes the relationship between the young Donald J. Trump (a near-unrecognizable Sebastian Stan) and his mentor, the lawyer Roy Cohn (a great Jeremy Strong), with acid laughs, broad strokes and two game leads. Cohn proves gross, but so too are some stomach-churning surgery images, including a hair-loss procedure with a vulva-shaped incision. Trump has called the movie “malicious defamation” and has threatened to sue; to date, it doesn’t have American distribution. (The similarly themed documentary “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” is available to watch in the United States.)
For “Emilia Pérez,” the French director Jacques Audiard has enlisted two American performers — Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez — for a musical about a Mexican cartel boss who wants to transition to a woman and to a better person. Gomez (as his wife) and especially Saldaña (his lawyer) amuse in a movie that jumps about without settling into a coherent groove. Audiard, as a friend of mine said, wants to believe in people’s ability to transform themselves. OK, fine, but the movie’s power largely rests with the Spanish trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón, who lays bare the contradiction between her character’s desires and violent past.
One of the pleasures of “Emilia Pérez” is that Audiard isn’t simply playing with genre, he is also testing the limits of character sympathy as well as shifting tones and moods. You’re never sure where “Emilia Pérez” is going or why, which is true of “Megalopolis” and for the similarly unclassifiable “Caught by the Tides,” from the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke (“A Touch of Sin”). I couldn’t find a narrative hook during that movie’s initial hour, which largely features documentary images of everyday people living their lives. Instead of fretting about what Jia was up to, though, I instead just went with the visual flow, letting the images wash over me.
Yet from the start, I also seized on some fictional scenes involving a woman, Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao), and her feckless lover, Bin (Zhubin Li). At first, these sections felt relatively disconnected from the nonfiction imagery. Yet as the movie continued, these dramatic fragments increasingly began to cohere into an organic whole, much like the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. And as these bits of fiction slipped together, they also began to illuminate the documentary visuals by creating ties between one woman’s story and that of a people who — as Jia tenderly shows — have sacrificed much for their country. The results are deeply touching in a movie that in its form, content and sincerity feels worlds away from Hollywood.
