This post-COVID confinement version of the festival featured maximum healthcare restrictions for the Cannes elite and minimum restrictions for everyone else. Thus, to enter the Palais where the competition screenings are held amid the splendor of the red carpet, you are required to have either a QR bar code proving two-shot vaccination in France or a 48-hour COVID test. It is mandatory in France to wear a mask inside, but for the opening ceremony, attended by the French Riviera and global 1 percent, both Variety and Screen reported that as soon as the lights went out many of the elite removed their masks and were not reminded by ushers to put them back on.

This year the entire festival bureaucracy has moved online, which caused much initial chaos. While the streaming services and their digital monopolies are being kept at a distance, not allowed entry into the main competition, the virtual rules the festival. All tickets are online in a system that often crashes, contains no summary of the 135 films in the festival now that the festival book is eliminated, and short circuits the human contact of waiting on line with other dedicated filmgoers. The online system has, like French organization as a whole, the appearance of elegance while being both inefficient and overly rule-bound. What makes it work is that the French people staffing the festival are able to help as they can, humanizing this mechanization just as they have always done with earlier versions of French bureaucracy, but once the system is automated, those lacking technical expertise are practically useless.

In a rapidly deteriorating world, plagued by multiple pandemics involving climate change, COVID, drugs, inequality, and racism, the usual blather about the sanctity of the auteur—the cinema director—since the films they make are often not confronting these problems, sounds simply like French industry speak. Indeed that’s what it is as the French cinema and theater owners are using this year’s edition to relaunch their films now backlogged from COVID, with over 450 films vying for attention as they are poured onto the market after the lockdown and facing the American streaming services who used the lockdown to launch their films online.

Because of the restrictions also, there is very little product or presence here from the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, which together account for 40 percent of the world’s population. This is a major shunting aside of what is supposed to be a global festival.

The best do not lack all conviction, but much conviction is shunted aside or squandered in NGO gobbledygook such as the Chadian director Hahamet-Saleh Haroun, who makes very good films like The Screaming Man about poverty in neocolonial African but who told the Western press that he was not Chadian but rather he spoke the global language of cinema. Well-intentioned but somewhat empty also is a special section called Cinema for the Climate. At this point, if that cinema is not exposing the fossil fuel companies or industrialized fishing magnates which are destroying the land and the oceans, it is really engaging in greenwashing, which most often, instead of combatting these companies, proposes individual solutions to the global problem. Emblematic is the film Bigger Than Us about a teenager from Bali (Indonesia) whose Bye Bye Plastic campaign got the island to ban plastic bags, straws, and styrofoam cups. Helpful but hardly controversial, and we are beyond the point where planting trees and recycling will solve the problem.

The best entry in terms of films was a fourth-level competition film The Gravedigger’s Wife about a Somali villager who has only a shovel to earn his daily bread, which he does by pursuing hearses and offering to bury the dead. His wife has kidney failure and will die if he does not come up with 5000 American dollars, a sum no one he knows possesses. The film is touching about his and her desperation, and in the end, just as all seems lost because a doctor will not perform the operation to save her without the money, a contemporary miracle occurs.

The film, which seems to be about individual heroic acts and acts of kindness actually calls attention to the need for a global system of health care, rather than relying on the kindness of strangers, though it stops at merely validating the miraculous individual act. The film originates in the West, and the Finnish-Somali actor Omar Abdi, whose tattered face fits in among the actual villagers, is excellent. His wife is played by a Canadian Somali model, and her bearing and looks are sometimes a jarring reminder of the presence of the Western gaze even in a quasi-neorealist film.

The worst are filled with passionate intensity might have been Yeats’s review of the festival opener Annette, which Le Monde, doing its part to restore French cinema, gave its highest rating, four stars.

Leos Carax is a talented director who makes “cinema,” films that are, depending on your taste, highly provocative (The Lovers on the Bridge) or fairly pretentious (Holy Motors). His latest stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard as a disparate couple who combine American low art and entertainment—he is a stand-up insult comic whose stage routine, of course, is not funny—with Continental high art as she is an opera singer.

The form of the film is operatic, mostly sung, with soundtrack and idea from the group Sparks. Carax updates the form, in one scene having Driver and Cotillard singing while he pleasures her, thus beginning both the film and the festival with the ditty “And so may we start,” the lyrics of which, like most of the songs, are simply a repeat ad nauseam of that line long after it has lost its referential meaning. The film makes use of Driver’s talents and rehearses his past roles, as a robed boxer about to go onstage shot from behind and looking like his Vader character from Star Wars, as out-of-control lover from Girls in the sung sex scene, and as employing his gorgeously melodious voice which was the revelation of A Marriage Story.

Onto a Hollywood tragedy, à la the boating death of Natalie Wood often attributed to her husband Robert Wagner, Carax grafts a criticism of the vacuousness of American entertainment in the form of the Driver character’s brutality in his treatment of the underused Cotillard. But the film over-exaggerates the brutality, defining it too often as coarseness rather than as violence, while conversely not showing enough of it in the way Scorsese does in the far better New York, New York. It offers Carax’s knowing genre play and thematic overloading as the answer instead of an actual critique of the way French and Continental high art and Hollywood are now moving toward becoming a more seamless whole in which neither allows the real problems of the world an airing. Annette is full of sound and fury but signifies little.

Falling into the same category is The Hill Where Lionesses Roar, which features three teenagers discontent with their lives in Kosovo, cleansed in this film of all its meaning as brutal site of destruction, with a mosque in the background the only signifier of its history. Instead, the film is mostly about the three teens frolicking, on a hill, in the water, in a hotel. And that’s about the beginning and the end of it.

More interesting, on a similar young girl coming-of-age theme, is the Croatian film Murina, which features a 17-year-old caught in a death grip between a domineering father and his seductive former boss, a successful businessman. The father is trying to induce the businessman to invest in a hotel on the prosperous Dalmatian Coast, now a dazzling global resort. The daughter is ultimately able to transcend both the physical violence of the father and the seductiveness of the boss, which since it is empty, is a kind of emotional brutality. However, neither is linked to the history of the brutality of a country with a fascist and ethnic cleansing past which is being erased as it enters the global economy as tourist paradise.

Similarly interesting and limited is the Argentine The Employer and The Employee, invoking Hegel’s master and slave dialectic as it plays out in the parallel relationship of the son of a wealthy landowner and the Indian boy he and his father treat as a servant. In the end, the Indian gets his revenge expressed in a bitter smile, but the revenge also dooms him in a way that suggests, incorrectly, that the only way out of this relationship is mutual self-destruction.

The antidote was provided in a passage from a documentary essay Mariner of the Mountains about a Brazilian journalist Karim Ainouz who journeys to Algeria in search of his father’s village. He quotes Frantz Fanon’s passage from his essay on violence that says that when the colonized realizes he or she is equal to the colonizer that is the beginning of the end of that relationship. We then see Algerian youth chanting “Murderous Regime” as they come to their own realization about a government that is selling them out. Here the passionate intensity is directed and purposeful, and the conviction of the youth of this generation is sincere. (People’s World — IPA Service)