At Cannes, Sneaky Period Pieces and Film Lovers' Delights Rule the Screen

New York Times

23-05-2025

On Thursday, a few minutes after 10 p.m. on the 10th day of the Cannes Film Festival, a multitude of exhausted attendees — critics, programmers, industry types — abruptly woke up. The Chinese movie 'Resurrection' had started, sending an immediate jolt through the theater. It was electric, dramatic, fantastic. People shifted in their seats to lean closer to the screen in the 1,068-seat auditorium. Experiencing awe can transform brains and bodies, and we were lit.
A deliriously inventive, elegiac, self-reflexive fantasy written and directed by Bi Gan, 'Resurrection' tracks a tragic mystery being, an entity known as a Fantasmer (Jackson Yee), across cinema history. A dreamer who clings to illusions, the Fantasmer's journey effectively mirrors that of film itself, from its beginnings to its uneasy present. What makes the film especially delectable is that Bi Gan changes visual styles and narrative techniques throughout this movie odyssey. The opening section seems to take place around the time that the 19th century gives way to the 20th, but more precisely looks like — and heavily references — films from the art's first few decades. Sometime later, a guy out of a Hollywood noir or a Jean-Pierre Melville thriller shows up.
Chockablock with nods to other films and filmmakers, 'Resurrection' is a cinephile's delight. It was especially pleasurable to watch Bi Gan's references to the pioneering Lumière brothers in a festival that showcases its award ceremony in a theater that bears their name. 'Resurrection' may be wreathed in melancholy, but Bi Gan's own journey through cinema is enlivening and encouraging. It was another reminder that great movies continue to be made despite the industry's continuing agonies, which only deepened when, the week before the festival opened, President Trump threatened to impose a crushing 100 percent tariff on movies that were produced in 'foreign lands,' though the White House has said no final decision had been made.
The threat cast a lingering pall. The world's largest film marketplace — where an estimated 15,000 industry professionals meet, great and make deals — takes place simultaneously with the festival. And the news out of the market was less than happy. 'Did Trump's tariffs hijack the world's busiest film market?' read a headline on the France 24 news site. 'Strong Festival, Soft Market' is how The Hollywood Reporter characterized the event's final stretch.
Whatever that means for our moviegoing future, this year's festival was gratifyingly strong, the finest in a long time. The selections in the main competition — which vie for the Palme d'Or — can be a mixed bag, the product of programming taste, yes, but also favoritism, backroom politicking and other considerations. The festival functions as a vital showcase for European cinema, but it also relies on celebrity-driven movies to attract the news media that promotes it. That's one reason the event is so protective of its red carpet and helps explains some of its much-derided rules, like no selfies on the steps leading to the Lumière.
It's easy to mock Cannes, but festivals like this one offer much-needed alternatives to big-studio dominance and equally necessary proof of life for the art. This year's edition offered a bounty of evidence. Top among the many such offerings was 'Magellan,' from the Filipino director Lav Diaz, which elliptically and hauntingly revisits the brutal path that the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal) cut through the world during his expeditions in the 16th century. With deep feeling, scant dialogue and images that can make you gasp — the lush beauty of the lands is continually in play with the horrors of men — Diaz shows what was lost when the ostensibly old world discovered everyone else.
One of the biggest shocks at this year's event wasn't onscreen: The Iranian director Jafar Panahi was here in person. A longtime favorite of the festival, Panahi has had numerous movies presented here but hasn't been able to attend for some time because of continual issues with the Iranian government, which banned him from filmmaking in 2010. The following year, prohibited from traveling abroad, he managed to show 'This Is Not a Film' by having it smuggled out. His latest, 'Un Simple Accident,' follows a group of everyday people who confront a revolutionary guard, a man who may be the same one who tortured them in prison. It's a blistering, beautifully directed movie, although it is ultimately Panahi's decency and humanity that has stayed with me for days.
On Wednesday, I talked to Panahi and asked how he had managed to make his latest movie. Speaking through a translator, he explained that he was no longer banned from filmmaking but that the process requires him to submit a script to the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, which will ask for changes before approving it. 'Of course, it is something that I cannot do given the type of stories that I tell,' he told me, adding, 'Not only wouldn't they give me the authorization, but they would prevent me from making it.'
So he still works clandestinely with a very small team in a short period of time, and he keeps 'backups of all the rushes that I shoot in case they come and arrest us.' In reality, he said, 'nothing has changed in my situation' except that he can now travel, and it was so good to have him at Cannes.
I can't want to revisit Kleber Mendonça Filho's singular, funny-tragic adventure 'The Secret Agent.' Set during the Brazilian dictatorship in 1977, it centers on Marcelo (Wagner Moura), who's fleeing for safety during 'a time of great mischief,' as the movie puts in. A pleasurably non-formulaic mixture of tones, moods and genres (romantic, dramatic, the pulpiest of fictions), 'The Secret Agent' blends the personal with the political as it zigs and zags, takes cinephile detours, tracks back to the past and looks toward the future. Dead bodies turn up on dusty roads alongside ravenous stray dogs, and the world shudders with violence. At one point, a severed leg goes on the run and hops into a park, kicking people in the rear, much as life generally does.
It's too bad that severed leg didn't hop into Ari Aster's 'Eddington' and start whacking everyone responsible for this self-amused, characteristically violent mess. Set in a New Mexico town shortly after the onset of the Covid pandemic, it stars Joaquin Phoenix as the local sheriff, an outwardly friendly, putatively regular guy who chafes at wearing a mask and decides to run for mayor against Pedro Pascal's liberal incumbent. Emma Stone, whose skimpy role suggests that she was brought in only to increase the movie's budget, plays his conspiracy-addled wife; Austin Butler shows up as a religious nut. The movie's big laughs are about masks and young white people interrogating their whiteness. Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he's saying something about America, the joke is on him.
Aster sucks up a lot of attention that would be better given to movies like 'The Mastermind,' Kelly Reichardt's quiet, emotionally sneaky period piece about a family man turned art thief named JB Mooney (a very fine Josh O'Connor). Reichardt doesn't tip her hand as to where she's going or why. JB's comically amateurish crime (he's planning to rob the world's sleepiest museum) gives Reichardt the opportunity to show off her eye for fine detail and talent for precisely calibrated slow burns. As the story continues, though, she discreetly sets JB's plans against the Vietnam War, a catastrophe that appears in news clips on TV screens and in snippets of conversations that are anything but casual.
As of my deadline, companies were apparently fighting over who will be lucky enough to distribute Richard Linklater's 'Nouvelle Vague' in the United States. An affectionately funny look at the French new wave set in 1959 and shot in incandescent black-and-white, it follows the young Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) as he struggles — financially, logistically, collectively — to make his first feature, that earth-shaker 'Breathless.' Linklater doesn't try to explain Godard, which is unnecessary. His movie is a testament of film love at its deepest, an ode to cinema and its immortals. A fictionalized François Truffaut pops up as does a fictionalized Agnès Varda, who drew applause from the audience when she appeared onscreen and tears from at least one sentimental viewer.