[COLUMN] Darren’s Cannes Diary, Day Twelve - The Finale (aka, the Cannes-clusion) | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

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2024-05-28 14:00:14

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As Cannes has continued on, I’ve found my public and private messages filled with one recurring question, “How long is Cannes, exactly?”

The answer is twelve days, which is a long time for a festival as intensive as this one. There is a sense of exhaustion as the festival enters its final day. There are no new premieres today, just screenings of films from earlier in the festival to allow audiences to catch up on any that they missed. A lot of the journalists and critics are already heading home, although there is an influx of reporters to cover the closing ceremony specifically.

With no new premieres to excite the press, rumors start circulating about the various awards. The team from The Substance have reportedly been summoned back to Cannes, does that mean that the film is taking home a major award? Francis Ford Coppola made a surprise appearance introducing the 8:30am screening of Megalopolis, could that mean the jury is going to make some grand celebration of the veteran filmmaker’s divisive epic?

Ultimately, a lot of this turns out to be noise. The Substance took home Best Screenplay, but didn’t win any of the higher profile awards that it was perceived to be in contention for. Coppola was actually hanging around to present his old friend George Lucas with his honorary award at the evening’s ceremony, rather than to collect one himself. This gives a sense at how quiet the final day of the festival is, that this is the level of gossip.

The town itself is appreciably quieter than it was even 24 hours earlier. The Grand Palais – the building that serves as the festival hub – is eerily empty. Footsteps echo through corridors. The Marché in the basement has been sealed off, with some of the festival staff even getting a start on taking down the posters and the advertising. That said, the screenings themselves are absolutely packed, as this seems to be the one day that locals are liable to get a seat to see these films.

I’ve been extremely lucky and reasonably well-organized during the festival. I have gotten to see most of the movies that I wanted to see while here. In fact, I’ve even managed to see a couple (Furiosa and Horizon) twice. So, coming up on the Saturday, there were really only two films that I had missed that I really wanted to see: Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine as Light, the first Indian feature film to screen in competition in three decades, and Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez (★★★★☆).

I’ll confess that it was a calculated choice to skip Emilia Pérez earlier in the festival. Audiard is something of a darling on the festival circuit, largely and deservedly down to his work on The Prophet. However, I tend to run hot and cold on Audiard’s work. As much as I admired The Prophet, I really loathed Rust and Bone and I did not especially care for Paris, 13th District. However, I got enough recommendations from people whose opinions I trust that I sought out Emilia Pérez.

Emilia Pérez stars Zoe Saldaña as Rita Moro Castro, a defense lawyer working thankless cases in Mexico City. She is approached by cartel leader Juan “Small Hands” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), who offers her a proposal. Del Monte wants to transition, to be reborn as the eponymous Emilia Pérez. Rita is tasked with finding a doctor who can perform the procedure with enough discretion to allow the gangster to escape this life of violence and horror.

Emilia Pérez is a musical, albeit a particularly strange one. Many of the film’s songs are whispered and spoken, occasionally feeling more like beat poetry than the traditional show stopping numbers associated with the classical musical form. Still, the film does feature some impressive set pieces, particularly those focused on Saldaña as Rita. There is a solid argument to be made that this is the finest work of Saldaña’s career to date. She is transfixing.

More to the point, Emilia Pérez is a fascinating illustration of form unified with function. Central to the classical musical is the idea that the characters can sing things that they could never otherwise articulate, that the songs provide a mode of expression for an inner life often buried beneath a more stoic exterior. Musicals are fantasies, but the fantasy is one of expression: a world where a person can express themselves so completely, clearly, and beautifully that the world bends around them.

In other words, it’s the perfect framework for Emilia Pérez, the story of a woman trying to find a way to manifest the true self buried beneath the violence and the posturing of her life as a cartel boss. Of course, Pérez’s transition poses its own challenges. Faking Del Monte’s death involved deceiving her wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and separating from her two children. Is it possible for Pérez to be authentically herself while also lying to the people that she loves?

There’s an appealingly literary quality to Emilia Pérez, where everything feels like a metaphor. Reinventing herself as a socialite and activist, the reborn Emilia Pérez dedicates her life to recovering and exhuming the bodies of all the innocents killed by the cartels and buried in unmarked graves. Perhaps this is another benefit of the musical format: subtext is for cowards, after all. However, as heightened as the premise might be, Emilia Pérez never loses sight of its emotional core.

Emilia Pérez was the last new film that I took in at Cannes. With a free afternoon, I had the luxury of taking in packed-out screenings of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (★★★★☆) and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness (★★★★☆), which were safely my two favorite films of those that screened in competition. It was great to see both again with an enthusiastic crowd, particularly since I am not sure that I’ll get another chance to see The Substance in a theatre.

After nearly a fortnight of films, it is admittedly nice to revisit films that you have already seen and which you know that you’ll enjoy. Indeed, it’s easier to just “go” with a film the second time around. With The Substance, it was easier to focus on the film’s more general body horror anxieties, the idea of one’s own body as something alien, hostile and monstrous. Obviously, the film is specifically about women’s bodies and women’s bodies in Hollywood, but there’s a universality there.

With Kinds of Kindness, it was the opportunity to consider the film’s exploration of the relationship between love and power, and how that can often feel religious in nature. After all, all three stories in Kinds of Kindness are ultimately about the question of sacrifice: what one person will do to “prove” their love to another, often in defiance of rationality. Religion is even explicitly part of the film’s third story, about a cult seeking out the messiah.

These thematic interests make a great deal of sense in the broader context of Lanthimos’ career. The Favorite was the story of two women vying for the love (and favor) of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). Kinds of Kindness marks Lanthimos’ first collaboration with screenwriter Efthimis Filippou since The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a film modelled on the Greek tragedy of Iphigenia in Aulis, the story of a child sacrificed to the gods by her own father.

I had been planning to attend the closing ceremony that evening, having secured a ticket, and was hoping to catch the late-night screening of All We Imagine as Light, but fate unfortunately intervened. Towards the end of Kinds of Kindness, I noticed a distinct feeling of unwellness. I had caught a stomach bug, likely due to some combination of exhaustion, the water fountains around the Grand Palais, and the food prepared outside it.

I retired, watching the reports of the closing ceremony from my apartment. It wasn’t necessarily the most auspicious end to my first trip to the Cannes Film Festival, but the truth is that my body managed to keep going for as long as it needed to; I even managed to fit in encore screenings of two of my favorite films of the festival. To complain would be churlish. Indeed, the bigger concern was the flight home with a delicate digestive tract, but that would be tomorrow’s problem.

It was a great trip. I saw some great films. I attended perhaps the most prestigious film festivals in the world. I caught black tie premieres, wandered the film market, soaked in the sun. I dabbled in virtual reality and conducted an interview with the production team behind The Apprentice. I was in the room as Kevin Costner cried tears of pride at the reception to Horizon and as the lights came back up so Nicolas Cage could wave to the balcony chanting “Nic-o-las!” before starting The Surfer.

So just a huge thank you to everybody who made it possible: Nick and Marty for signing various paperwork to get me accredited; the staff at Cannes for working with me to greenlight my application; the film critics who helped me prepare for (and navigate) the trip itself; and you, the readers who have been following along on this journey. Take care, guys.

Check out the rest of Darren’s Cannes columns below –