Movie Poster of the Week: The Posters of the 2017 Cannes Competition on Notebook

Above: Redoubtable by Michel Hazanavicius (France)

It’s that time of year again: time for those of us who are not in Cannes for the next two weeks to live vicariously through Twitter (and of course MUBI’s always insightful coverage). For me, the first glimpse of the films that I am missing on the Croisette are the posters. Often rushed out as an afterthought to a film that is itself barely out of the editing room, Cannes posters are sometimes slapdash, often just serviceable. But there are always standouts, like The Handmaiden last year and The Lobster the year before that, both of which ended up among my favorite posters of the year.

Say what you will about his previous foray into film history, but Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable—about Jean-Luc Godard’s relationship with Anne Wiazemsky, set during the making of La chinoise and with Louis Garrel playing Godard no less—must be one of the most anticipated of this year’s films even if only for curiosity’s sake. Its poster, with its Godardian color scheme, hits all the right notes and could almost have been the campaign for this year’s festival itself.

Other highlights include the eccentrically composed poster for Sophia Coppola’s The Beguiled, about which Indiewire’s David Ehrlich tweeted “drape this over my casket like a flag when I die”; the elegantly simple design for Hong Sang-soo’s The Day After (note how lettering is key in both posters); the garish neon of the what-the-hell-is-going-on-in-this-poster poster for the Safdies’ Good Time; the beam-me-up-Scotty blur of the Killing of a Sacred Deer poster (released just yesterday); and the somber cabinet-of-curiosities delight of the teaser for Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck. But best of all must be the poster for Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, which, even more so than Wonderstruck, promises much in the way of weird and wonderful things.

Posters are still missing for five films, including two that I would be most excited to see were I there: Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless and Ruben Östlund’s The Square. If any of them turn up during the festival I will add them below. In the meantime, here is the rest of the Palme d’Or competition in alphabetical order.