The 77th Cannes Film Festival has opened in a state of epistemological crisis, as the catastrophic absence of major American studio releases leaves the international critical establishment with absolutely nothing to gleefully dismantle over lukewarm espresso.
The Croisette, normally a vibrant tapestry of transatlantic tension where the highborn European auteur must physically elbow past a man in a promotional Chewbacca suit, now feels distressingly, suffocatingly dignified; one wanders the promenade in a state of profound psychic unmooring, entirely bereft of the spiritual ballast normally provided by a towering, aggressively luminous Disney marketing activation. It is a silence that deafens; a void that consumes. We find ourselves trapped in a cinematic wasteland reminiscent of the temporal purgatory in F.W. Murnau’s canonical 1927 masterpiece Sunrise, though possessing none of the vital, punishing asceticism found in Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s notoriously grueling 1975 adaptation of Moses and Aaron, nor, heaven help us, the muscular, deeply American vulgarity of Kung Fu Panda 4.
The dialectical engine of the festival demands an antagonist, yet the current slate offers only competence and vision, leaving the critical apparatus to wither on the vine. Without the looming, bloated corpse of a summer blockbuster dragging its uninspired third act across the screen of the Grand Théâtre Lumière, the delicate ecosystem of European intellectual superiority collapses in upon itself in a matter of hours. How, one must inevitably ask, can a critic properly parse the quiet, yearning melancholia of James Gray’s latest endeavor when the palate has not first been scorched by the radioactive, intellectual napalm of a major studio’s cinematic universe?
Without the looming threat of an aggressively marketed sequel to a legacy franchise starring a de-aged action star, my dissertation on the spatial politics of the slow-cinema movement feels entirely unmoored from the current geopolitical reality.
To engage with Jane Schoenbrun’s mesmerizing, neon-lit dread without the immediate, contrasting context of a Chris Pratt voiceover vehicle is to demand an audience view the Mona Lisa in a sensory deprivation tank; it is the frame of absolute, soul-deadening American commercialism that gives the arthouse picture its righteous, oppositional meaning. We are being asked, quite unfairly, to simply watch good films and evaluate them on their own merits, a vulgar and pedestrian exercise that fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of international film criticism.
As the festival lurches forward into its second week, one can observe desperate critics huddled outside the Palais, hallucinating a post-credits scene just to feel the familiar, comforting warmth of their own superiority. Until the studios return to provide us with the multi-million-dollar trash required to sustain our towering cultural disdain, Cannes will remain a tragic shadow of its former self, haunted by the specter of the cinematic garbage we never knew how desperately we needed.