Cannes 2025: Clapologists get it wrong, an acidic Israeli satire is too hot to handle, and Scarlett Johansson serves up schmaltz

Irish Times

26-05-2025

A few days before the end of a strong, if rarely spectacular, 78th
Cannes film festival
, clapologists declared the race for the Palme d'Or over. Securing a bunion-inducing 19-minute standing ovation – by some measures the third-longest in the event's history – Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value could surely not lose.
It was hardly worth again pointing out that the length of these compulsory standies has as much to do with when film-makers choose to leave the auditorium as it has with audience sentiment.
Anyway, as events played out, Jafar Panahi
took the Palme d'Or
for the lethally focused thriller It Was Just an Accident. The Iranian film concerns a sometime political prisoner who kidnaps a man he suspects of being his former torturer. But is it really the same fellow? He draws together other ex-prisoners for confirmation, causing pitch-black comedy to vie with harrowing revelation.
Panahi
, imprisoned by the Iranian state for alleged antigovernment propaganda in 2010, offers a simple tale that reveals multitudes on closer pondering. He becomes only the fourth director to win the three biggest prizes in European cinema, adding the Palme to his Golden Bear, at Berlin, and Golden Lion, at Venice. It was a popular win for the best-reviewed film at the event.
READ MORE
Cannes 2025: It Was Just an Accident
Cannes 2025: Sentimental Value
Despite that marathon bout of applause, Sentimental Value had to settle for the Grand Prix, essentially the second prize.
Trier
, whose
The Worst Person in the World
wowed Cannes in 2021, returned to more acclaim with this richly appointed study of a veteran film director seeking to draw his actor daughter into a project rooted in murky family history.
One cannot escape the comparisons with Ingmar Bergman – Stellan Skarsgard could well be playing a fictionalised variation – but the film also suggests the (nonfunny) Woody Allen films most indebted to that director.
The average quality was probably higher than in 2024, even if no title looks likely to emulate the crossover appeal of last year's Palme-winning
Anora
. There were, however, enough divisive films for this reviewer to mourn the recent inexplicable absence of booing at Cannes.
Ari Aster's Eddington, starring
Joaquin Phoenix
as a New Mexico sheriff who gets caught up in conspiracy theories during the 2020 lockdown, is just the sort of picture that would once have had the unconvinced hissing as the captivated cheered. I cheered (a bit).
Aster
has fun trolling all political persuasions but can't find a way out of the muddle he has built for his increasingly demented protagonist.
Cannes 2025: Eddington
Watching Julia Ducournau's Alpha, I thought of Tom Baker's sea captain from Blackadder II. 'Opinion is divided on the subject,' the barnacled veteran said when asked if it was good practice for ships to have a crew. 'All the other captains say it is; I say it isn't.'
Well, opinion is divided on Alpha. Almost the entire mass of Cannes felt Ducournau's follow-up to her Palme-winning
Titane
was a folly, but, unlike me, they were not appreciating the weird complexity of the mingling between Mélissa Boros's determined adolescent and a heroically starved Tahar Rahim as her drug-addicted brother.
Why were none of those detractors booing in our packed screening at the Debussy Theatre? A bit of the invigorating rawness of Cannes has gone missing. Boo!
One film in competition that did gather a genuine wave of surprised enthusiasm was Óliver Laxe's Sirât. Though set contemporarily, the Spanish film feels as if it is spinning a yarn from the hippie era. Like Milos Forman's Taking Off, from 1971, Sirât follows a man who believes he has lost his child to the counterculture. Luis, played by Sergi López, takes his son and dog to Morocco with a mind to probing the rave community about a missing daughter.
Cannes 2025: Óliver Laxe's Sirât
This gripping film shared the festival's Jury Prize with Mascha Schilinski's excellent Sound of Falling and took a Grand Jury Prize at the reliably barking Palm Dog awards. That eccentric ceremony, still going strong after 25 years, awarded its main prize for canine excellence to the Icelandic sheepdog Panda, from The Love That Remains, directed by
Hlynur Pálmason
.
The 78th edition saw a rush of movie stars getting behind the camera at the Un Certain Regard section. An appointment with
Bono: Stories of Surrender
kept me from seeing Kristen Stewart's well-received The Chronology of Water, but I was there for Harris Dickinson's commendable Urchin and for Scarlett Johansson's utterly bogus Eleanor the Great.
Dickinson
, star of Babygirl and Triangle of Sadness, directs Frank Dillane as an untrustworthy, but charmingly vulnerable, homeless person in a contemporary east London that Dickens would have recognised. Dickinson and Dillane work hard at teasing the audience's sympathies with a character who won't engage his own potential.
Cannes 2025: Urchin
Cannes 2025: Eleanor the Great
In contrast,
Johansson
tells a tale in which every moral transgression will, we know from the beginning, be negated by an injection of dishonest schmaltz. June Squibb is, of course, touching as an elderly woman relocated to New York after her pal dies in Florida. Adapted from a play by Tory Kamen that I never want to see, Eleanor the Great sets up a series of cardboard-flimsy relationships that exist only to further mechanical dilemmas.
From the scenario I expected something 'irresistible' – a word critics use when they cry at a film they know to be bad. I snorted. I groaned. I did not blub.
Cannes 2025: Yes!
The hottest potato of the festival turned out, as expected, to be Nadav Lapid's acidic Israeli satire Yes!
A riot of flashily cut images lays out the story of a young musician who, in the aftermath of the
October 7th attacks
, takes on the commission for a bloodthirstily jingoistic national anthem. Premiering in Directors' Fortnight, Yes! will unnerve a kaleidoscope of political factions and, as a result, may struggle for distribution in some territories. The Faustian protagonist concludes that Israel has become the answer to its own post-Holocaust wrangling over how people can 'live normally while perpetuating violence'. But Yes! also features a harrowing description of the October 7th assault. 'Blindness in Israel is, unfortunately, a fairly collective illness,'
Lapid
said at the festival. An essential, uncomfortable watch.
What else made noise?
Element Pictures
, the Dublin-formed production company, scored a special mention from the Camera d'Or jury for best first feature with Akinola Davies jnr's My Father's Shadow, but their larger breakthrough was Harry Lighton's Pillion. The light-footed title, following a young man as he becomes sexually submissive to a handsome biker, took best screenplay in Un Certain Regard and won countless good reviews.
Kleber Mendonça Filho won two awards in the main competition for The Secret Agent, a bewitching, patient examination of Brazil during its oppressive 1970s. Some liked Spike Lee's sprawling thriller Highest 2 Lowest, but, despite a reliably charismatic turn from
Denzel Washington
, I found it contrived and overreaching.
Paul Mescal
, in town for Oliver Hermanus's
The History of Sound
, saw that period film greeted with mostly tepid reviews.
[
Paul Mescal tries hard but ultimately The History of Sound is flimsy
Opens in new window
]
Talk of Donald Trump's tariffs gave way to ponderings about
Gérard Depardieu's conviction
for sexual assault. Palm-tree safety became a concern when one such perennial blew over and injured a Japanese producer. Journalists found the fight for tickets more fraught than ever.
But the closing memory will be of panicky annihilation of essential technologies. On the final morning, suspected sabotage caused an enormous power outage that left attendees unable to use ATMs to access the cash that shops, restaurants and travel services could now only accept. The final lesson of Cannes 2025? Always keep an emergency €50 in your wallet.