74th Cannes Film Festival Report 2

By Moira Jean Sullivan

© 2021 - Moira Jean Sullivan

For the first time ever in the history of the festival Spike Lee became the first black man to serve as president of the feature film jury. Also unprecedented was that a majority of womenwere on the jury Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jessica Hausne, Mati Diop, Mélanie Laurent , and singer songwriter Mylène Farmer.

Léa Seydoux was in four films in the official competition at this year's festival but di not travel to Cannes to promote them following her positive Covid-19 test while working on a film. One was Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch with each frame magnificently executed and a cast of thousands, but the spectator is the polite sitting one, and as was the audience at Cannes. Léa Seydoux plays a prison guard who poses nude for an inmate considered a genius played by Benicio Del Toro.

Seydoux also is in ldiko Enyedi’s A feleségem története (The Story Of My Wife), a film in seven acts based on a 1942 novel by the Hungarian writer Milán Füst was shot in Hamburg, Budapest and Malta. Léa Seydoux plays Lizzie, a duplicitous and charming woman who accepts the invitation to marry a sea captain Jakob Störr (Dutch actor Gijs Naber).

The Palm d’Or went to Titane in the Cannes official competition which is overwhelmingly cinematic and engaging from beginning to end. Directed by Julia Ducournau it is about Alexia a young girl in a car accident with a titanium implant in her head. She grows up and when we next see her she is as an erotic dancer standing on the hoods of shiny racing cars. Eventually she is trapped in a car and is forced to have sex with the car. The experience sends her on a journey where she winds up mistaken as the biological son of the fire marshal of the fire brigade (Vincent Lindon). The film is bold and Ducournau is a magnetic director with stellar performances by Agathe Rousselle as Alexia and Vincent Lindon. Ducournau is the second woman to win the Palm d’Or since 1993 when Jane Campion shared the price for The Piano with Chen Kaige for Farewell My Concubine.

It was the first time Cannes opened its doors for the festival since the pandemic and the event was successful because of the vigilance in monitoring safety procedures against Covid. Next week more from the Cannes Film Festival.

- Air Date: 07/21/21
Movie Magazine International