India has always had a blow-hot-blow-cold affair with the Cannes Film Festival, whose 78th edition begins on May 13 on the divinely scenic French Riviera - once the playground for the rich, the beautiful and the famous. Let us not forget that it was here that fairy tales unfolded. One of them was between the extraordinarily beautiful American actress, Grace Kelley and the Prince of Monaco, Prince Rainer, a tiny principality within France.
This year, India returns to Cannes with Neeraj Ghayawan’s ‘Homebound’. It will play during the 12-day Festival’s ‘Un Certain Regard’, the second most important category after Competition. Ghayawan’s debut feature, ‘Masaan’, was also selected for the ‘Un Certain Regard’ in 2015 and it won the ‘Special Prize’. Last year, Sanjay Suri’s, ‘Santosh’ was part of this section.
Last year saw India’s Payal Kapadia arriving at the Croisette (Cannes’ beachfront with its Palace where the festival takes place) with her story of two lonely nurses in Mumbai, ‘All We Imagine As Light’. It competed at the festival and won the second-highest award after Palm d'Or - the Grand Prix. The Cannes Competition was seeing an Indian entry after three decades, the last to vie being the late Shaji N Karun’s ‘Swaham’ in 1994.
Unbelievable as this may sound today, the Cannes Film Festival may never have happened had it not been for the haughty Italians, who under Benito Mussolini had been organising a festival in Venice. There was this one year in the early 1930s when the French found themselves out of Venice and they were angry and decided to hold one themselves. They would make sure that it was independent of any political influence, given that Venice was virtually a propaganda platform for Fascist forces.
The first edition of Cannes would have happened in September 1939, but with Hitler’s forces invading Poland and the outbreak of World War II, the festival had to be put off till September 20, 1946. Cannes has never had to look back since then except for one year in 1968 when a workers’ demonstration in France led by the legendary French director, Francois Truffaut and others resulted in the festival’s curtains being drawn mid-way.
Some of the titles in this year’s competition are by legendary auteurs - like Kelly Reichardt (‘The Mastermind’, a heist adventure unfolding during the Vietnam war), Norway’s Joachim Trier (‘Sentimental Value’ coming after his triumphant ‘The Worst Person of the World’), controversial Iranian director Jafar Panahi (‘A Simple Drama’), two-time Palme d'Or clinchers Dardenne Brothers (‘The Young Mother’s Home’ - about Belgium’s social realism), South African director Oliver Hermanus (‘The History of Sound’, a World War I romance on the road) and France’s Dominik Moll (‘Dossier 137’, a crime caper).
Some subjects this time seem like shockers. Julia Docournau, who walked away with the Palm in 2021 for her ‘Titane’ (an explosive body horror), will this time present in competition ‘Alpha’, which follows an 11-year-old girl who is shunned by her classmates after she is rumoured to be carrying a new disease.
The ‘Un Certain Regard’ section, which comprises the first and second films of promising directors, also includes Scarlett Johansson’s helming debut ‘Eleanor the Great’, Morad Mostafa’s ‘Aisha Can’t Fly Away’, Tarzan Nasser’s and Arab Nasser’s ‘Once Upon A Time In Gaza’, Harris Dickinson’s ‘Urchin’ and Kei Ishikawa’s ‘A Pale View of the Hills’.
Also to be seen at Cannes will be Wes Anderson’s ‘The Phoenician Scheme’, Richard Linklater’s ‘Nouvelle Vague’ and Ari Aster’s ‘Eddington’.
Finally, Tom Cruise will be back at Cannes for the world premiere of ‘Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’. It will bow ‘Out Of Competition’, another festival’s section. Works like these are the festival’s way of giving itself a populist image. But is this really necessary? Cannes is an epitome of cinematic art and Cruise’s work may spoil this image.
(Gautaman Bhaskaran has been covering the Cannes Film Festival for 30-odd years)