Yes, I know that Cannes is reckoned a citadel of capital-C cinemah, and yes I know that it's famous for premiering art movies from all over the world. So it may sound a bit odd when I tell you that one of the best films showing here—maybe even the best—is a Hollywood action movie that's opening tomorrow in the U.S.
Normally, when this kind of populist crowd-pleaser plays at Cannes—like Pirates of the Caribbean or Indiana Jones—it's showered with boos from an audience that thinks of it as the embodiment of evil. Here, viewers not only applauded at the end, but even during the movie each time a bravura sequence came to an end. One famous critic even declared it "the best movie ever made." Even if you don't normally like action pictures, Mad Max will astound you. It's a shame it's not in competition. I can almost imagine the jury—headed by the Coen Brothers, who know good directing—giving it the Palme d'Or. But only almost. This is Cannes, after all.
And it is the enduring genius of Cannes that it is always the same—crowds thronging the Croisette to get a glimpse of the stars, enormous billboards plugging movies you'll never hear of again, TV cameras pushing into your face after screenings to get your reaction—yet it somehow manages to make every year feel different. One small way is with the official satchel they give everyone who's part of the festival. Its omnipresence makes it one of the year's trademarks—sometimes unhappily so, when the design is some shiny white plastic that looks like go-go boots from the sixties. The 2015 version is a real keeper. It looks like a classic child's schoolbag but in bright blue—as if it had been designed by Wes Anderson. Civilians can see or even buy it here.
Of course, the 2015 festival feels different in more important ways, too.
Take the visibility of women. Last year, the festival was voluminously thumped for the absence of female filmmakers—so voilà!—this year's opening night film, Standing Tall, wasn't merely made by French actress Emmanuelle Bercot, but the red carpet was pointedly dominated by women: Natalie Portman (who's making her directorial debut), Julianne Moore, Naomi Watts, Lupita Nyong'o, Chinese stars Fan Bingbing and Angelababy. Ruling the stairway to the Palais was Catherine Deneuve who, 71 years old and still starring in films, may be the closest thing there is to the Queen of France.
She's essentially playing the soul of France itself in Bercot's movie, which starts off looking like a gritty movie about a troubled young man—played by charismatic newcomer Rod Paradot, who resembles a young Leonardo DiCaprio—but winds up being hymn of praise to the benevolent French social system. Deneuve plays a judge who, no matter how often he acts crazy or violent – he's a kid stuck on fury road—still tries to see his best side and labors to save him with help from a social worker played by the French Sean Penn, Benoît Magimel. Naturally, she does. Just as naturally, it was adored by the French audience. As for the rest of the world, we snickered at the Gallic amour-propre, while admitting that by the standards of the famously dreadful opening-night fare at Cannes—last May was the risible Grace of Monaco—it was pretty good. And people are saying that Paradot is a real discovery.
A more important discovery is that film is globalizing even faster than you ever imagined. Just as Hollywood movies are now made with foreign audiences in mind—meaning more action and less dialogue—so directors from outside the U.S. are learning that it's hard to sell a film abroad in their own language with homegrown stars. This year's competition includes two movies from Italy, one from Greece, and one from Norway, and what all four of their hot filmmakers have in common is that they're working in English with stars you know from Hollywood.
Last night was the first of them, Tale of Tales, one of the rare movies nowadays that tries to capture the primal feeling of real fairy tales rather than do a wised-up riff on them. Working from a classic book of fairy tales, filmmaker Matteo Garrone interweaves three stories about royalty—one about an overbearing queen (Salma Hayek) who'll do anything to have a baby, another about a womanizing king (Vincent Cassel) who unwittingly tries to seduce a crone, and yet another about a ruler (Toby Jones) so obsessed with fleas that he marries his daughter off to an ogre. While the movie has an unsettlingly cross-cultural vibe—it looks like the characters should be speaking Italian instead of English—Garrone has a wonderful visual sense and, by the film's end, builds to some genuine and startling emotion. It's not a knockout like Mad Max: Fury Road, but heck, it would be a lot to expect two great movies from a festival that, as I write this, isn't even 24 hours old.