Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.
As part of our Cannes 2024 coverage, we invited critics, filmmakers, and programmers to give their first impressions of the festival.
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Giovanni Marchini Camia
(co-founder, Fireflies Press; contributor, Sight & Sound)
The reconstruction (“It’s not a mere restoration,” we were told during the introduction) of Napoléon, as seen by Abel Gance, was the first film to play at this year’s festival—after the Berlinale’s TinyHouse, this is symbolism at its most ready-made. Impossible to watch this inordinately glorious, inordinately chauvinistic film at Cannes without thinking of Thierry Frémaux, the festival world’s very own Napoleon, the man everyone loves to hate. As rumors of an impending labor strike and #MeToo bombshell crescendoed ahead of that evening’s opening ceremony, no image could have been more fitting than Napoleon braving a furious storm on a rickety fishing boat, a French flag fashioned into a sail as his only lifeline.
Jordan Cronk
(contributor, Artforum)
While the first few films of the 2024 Cannes competition did little to dispel predictions of a less-than-estimable selection, Francis Ford Coppola’s fearlessly mounted epic Megalopolis has arrived to (at least temporarily) assuage such fears. A movie that doesn’t exceed expectations so much as move the goalposts entirely. “When we leap into the unknown we prove that we are free.”
Beatrice Loayza
(contributor, Film Comment)
I’m shocked that screenings have been starting on time here at Cannes. Typically I’d be grateful—the French aren’t particularly known for their punctuality—but I’m writing this after having been shut out of Andrea Arnold’s Bird despite having a ticket and queuing fifteen minutes prior to showtime. I was sliced off, as were a few dozen extremely angry French and Italian journalists, like a rotten limb—and yes, there was something of a riot given that the fault, the way we see it, lies with the sluggish security process. I was quite looking forward to what has been rumored to be a big swing and miss, though I’m certain Arnold doesn’t have the same kind of beautiful disaster in her as Francis Ford Coppola, whose Megalopolis has been the only film in a so-far whatever festival to make me swoon with ambivalence. Obviously, I’d prefer to fall passionately in love with at least one film I see here—it’s still early—but for now, given the lackluster start and the shitty weather, I’ll take anything that makes me feel something.
Flavia Dima
(contributor, Films in Frame)
A list of (non-menial) things on my mind as I prepare for Cannes ’24: (1) Spring came a month early to Bucharest. I wonder if the peonies will still be in bloom by the time I come back home. (2) I wonder how Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada will mark a new chapter after his Bressonian trilogy. (3) I’m most excited about the return of two of my favorite living auteurs: Miguel Gomes and Jia Zhangke. (4) Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light has already won my award for the most beautiful title of the festival. (5) I’m devastated that I won’t be able to catch Scénarios, Jean-Luc Godard’s last film. (6) Last, but certainly not least: Gaza, Rafah, hopes for a ceasefire.
Leonardo Goi
(contributor, Notebook)
Where are the strikes? And what about that #MeToo list? The first questions I heard in Cannes weren’t variations of the usual What titles are you most excited about?, but dilemmas that felt of somewhat greater importance than the festival itself. As I type, the strikes announced by a collective of festival workers over salary increases and unemployment benefits haven’t materialized, nor has the rumored list of new sexual abuse allegations in the French film industry. Instead, Cannes kicked off with Quentin Dupieux’s The Second Act, a rumination on the meaning and purpose of cinema today. I expect the films I’m most excited about will yield some answers as to the kind of future we can expect for the medium—and how it may speak to these troubled times. Isn’t this why we all come to Cannes?
Daniel Kasman
(editor-in-chief, Notebook)
Anticipation defines the beginning of most film festivals, when untainted potential lies gleaming before us. In Cannes, the community waited with bated breath for (a) the release of rumored bombshell list of #MeToo offenders in the French industry; (b) the very real threat of a strike of festival workers by Sous les écrans la dèche (“under the screens, the waste”), a collective demanding greater job security in a particularly precarious sector of a notoriously precarious industry; and (c) the premiere of Francis Ford Coppola’s luxe passion project Megalopolis, which has faced a startling bad-faith effort by multiple publications suggesting its failure even before it premiered. So far, a deflated soufflé: anticipation wanes, reality sets in. Rain the first few days; the “list” has been denied; the collective, while visibly present, seems to be holding fire. The Coppola, though, has proven delightfully contentious; in the space between its retro American Zoetrope production logo (cheered by many in the audience) and its final dedication to the director’s late wife (revealed after a few churlish boos had already started up) one can find a grand folly whose ambition none can fault. It may not be everything we’d hoped for, but it’s far beyond anything we could have anticipated.
