Cannes Film Festival: Good cause, bad film

by time news

EIt could have been so nice at the 75th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, but then everything turned out differently again. After last summer’s emergency edition, the world’s most famous film festival was finally back in full swing, with over 30,000 accredited attendees and all the hustle and bustle that goes with it, Bentleys on the Croisette, honorary baton for Tom Cruise, Léa Seydoux on the red carpet.

So after the surreal zoom years of the pandemic, reality was back, even if it itself seemed surreal at times. If one pauses and considers what they have taught one now, at the end of nearly two weeks, one thing stands out, and that is that reality continues to defiantly resist ideological co-optation.

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For example, the only invited Russian. With his film “Tchaikovsky’s Wife,” Kirill Serebrennikov slipped through the net of sanctions that had been thrown out to fish out anything that could have anything to do with Putin and his war. The 52-year-old director is a declared enemy of the system, was under house arrest for years and, meanwhile, staged quasi qua secret ink, with his lawyer smuggling notes into German or Swiss theaters in which Serebrennikov brought Mozart or Chekhov to the stage in his absence. But he also lives in Moscow, shoots with Russian money, among other things, and in his new film not only deals with a Russian theme, but also with a national myth, namely the great composer Tchaikovsky. In one scene his wife is sent to the country; an overlay reveals that she ends up in a village “near Kyiv” – of course part of the Russian Empire in the 1980s.

Is that a sign of approval for a war of aggression that violates international law? A Ukrainian director thought yes and protested. It doesn’t matter, said Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk, whether someone is a refugee, a member of the opposition or a dissident. “Whoever is here is part of Russian propaganda.”

Sissis Stinkefinger

Serebrennikov’s film was very little political, more a homage to an obsession: a woman loves a gay man. The explicit sexuality is historically documented, but runs counter to the ideal Russian self-image, which is why the current culture minister does not want to have anything to do with it. Can this be propaganda? Or is a phrase like “who is here is part of Russian propaganda” not itself propaganda, in this case pro-Ukrainian?

The term stands for “systematic dissemination of political or ideological ideas and opinions with the aim of influencing general consciousness in a certain way”. Statements are generalized, disturbing details are ignored. In this respect, such a sentence is the opposite of art, which, if successful, is equipped with an excess of meaning to the point of enigma. Such a sentence is also the opposite of criticism, which traces ambivalences, the smallest changes in temperature and vibration and opens up to the requirements of the respective work of art. Serebrennikov’s film was an early triumph of the festival.

Things were different with Marie Kreutzer’s “Corsage”, a new interpretation of the “Sissi” material. The Austrian empress is an unstable, narcissistic princess on the pea who suffers from so much representation and is married to a bore who also happens to be an emperor. So she lives out her selfishness to the full, breaking human hearts and horses’ legs; the people are avoided in a row, the horses are shot. Sissi gives an evening party the finger.

It’s supposed to be feminist in a way, but drags along so free of self-mockery that you soon no longer believe that this can have anything to do with Austria, the country of lovingly malicious nonsense. But because the conviction was also widespread among the premiere viewers that what shouldn’t be can’t happen, they claimed afterwards with exhausted expressions that they had seen a very good film.

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The Frankfurt Römerberg with the destroyed Paulskirche in 1945

The phenomenon was even more extreme in David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future”. In a scene from the soon to be 80-year-old’s latest body horror, a dancer has both of his eyes sewn shut. He would have been the film’s best viewer, but not because he was as scandalously shocking as Cronenberg himself, in best PR fashion, dictated into the microphones before the premiere. “Crimes of the Future” is best seen with your eyes closed, because otherwise you would be bored to death with the characters sitting around in junkyards, boredly reciting philosophy sentences from the proseminar before they cut each other again.

Of course, there were also a few great films at the festival. They usually had in common that they left political statements to politicians.

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