Cannes 2025: Tom Cruise's death-defying wing-walking, the festival's ban on accused actor, and the poster on every lamp-post

Irish Times

16-05-2025

Cannes do spirit
Can Cannes do for Mission: Impossible what it did for Top Gun? Three years ago Tom Cruise came here with
Top Gun: Maverick
and, $1.4 billion later, it was decided he had saved cinema from the pandemic.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
, apparently the last in the action sequence, did not receive unbroken praise, but nobody can fault Cruise for effort. He waved at every fan. He pumped every hand.
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First Look: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning: Tom Cruise gets all sentimental amid some suave mayhem
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Journalists who turned up for a public interview with Chris McQuarrie, the film's director, were surprised when Cruise, dressed in claret leisurewear, arrived to support his friend and colleague. You hardly need to be told they confirmed Tom was up there with the stuntmen for the sequence in which Ethan Hunt straddled the wing of a biplane.
Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Expert wing-walkers were uneasy. 'They said, 'What do you want to do?'' McQuarrie explained. 'And Tom said, 'I want to be zero G in between the wings of the plane.' And these people, who do this for a living and are part of a decades-long tradition, said, 'No, you're not going to do that,' and Tom said, 'Thank you for your time.' And we went on to some other people.'
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The tireless actor is touring the world with the new film. 'I don't mind encountering the unknown,' he said. 'It's just an emotion for me, and it's something that is not paralysing.' Tom Cruise is 62.
Festival bans actor accused of rape
Barely two days after Gérard Depardieu, hitherto Cannes royalty, was
found guilty
of sexually assaulting two women, the festival has banned an actor accused of rape from walking the red carpet for a high-profile premiere.
Théo Navarro-Mussy, who plays a detective in Dominik Moll's thriller Dossier 137, has, according to the magazine
Télérama
, been accused of assault by three women. The case was dropped for lack of evidence – 'I have explained myself to the justice system and at this stage have been cleared,' the actor remarked – but the accusers are planning an appeal and, perhaps, a civil suit.
The apparent decision to bar actors accused of sexual assault brings Cannes in line with changes in policy at the César Awards, France's version of the Oscars.
Dossier 137, an impressive study of police brutality in the aftermath of the gilets jaunes protests, premiered, in competition for the Palme d'Or, with all the usual bells and whistles at the Lumière Theatre on Thursday night.
Great director does his Trump-slagging duty
To the Croisette Theatre, a few hundred metres from the Palais, for the opening of the Directors' Fortnight sidebar. They don't half give it some welly at that bash. Whereas the main festival got through its ceremony in under an hour – including a musical number, various tributes and the awarding of an honorary Palme d'Or to Robert De Niro – the funkier sidebar took an hour and a half to kick events off.
A collective called Sous les Écrans la Dèche (Broke Behind the Screens) discussed their efforts to improve workers' rights at festivals. We had several homilies to cinema. All of this translated into English by an onstage interpreter.
Happily, we did also see the award of the Carrosse d'Or, the Fortnight's career honour, to the great American film-maker Todd Haynes. The director of Carol and Far from Heaven did his duty by slagging off Donald Trump as he referred to the 'barbaric US president' and the 'rise of the far right'.
But he was clearly moved. 'This prize means a tremendous amount to me, because of course it's the core honour of the Directors' Fortnight,' Haynes told Le Monde. 'It comes out of a very specific history that is very political and that sort of drew a line in the sand in 1968 that separated the official Cannes festivities from something that was very auteurist.'
Silent film stars
The world's film journalists have been complaining about the amount of access they get to talent at big film festivals. 'Twas ever thus,' you might reasonably quip. But many of the busier journos do feel that big names are now available for notably fewer interviews.
The controversy reached a head at the San Sebastián festival last year, when a group of scribes walked out after two round-table interviews were cancelled in favour of a press conference. At such affairs only a minority may get to ask a question.
As Cannes kicked off, about 100 international journalists signed a statement asking studios, talent representatives and festival organisers to improve access. 'At a time when in-depth articles or interviews are giving way to social media influencers reports, the place given to cultural debates becomes a fundamental issue,' it said.
'The outright disappearance of quality film journalism would not only be detrimental to the press, but also to the visibility of films and festivals.'
Flying monkey
Every year, some plucky independent producer (or distributor, sales agent or whatever) manages to dominate the Croisette by having his posters on every lamp-post. In 2019, I remember, it was a film called The Bra – which, yes, really did concern a train driver seeking to find the owner of an abandoned brassiere.
Akiko the Flying Monkey
This year it is a potential masterpiece by one Veit Helmer entitled Akiko the Flying Monkey. The image of a monkey in an small aeroplane is already everywhere. 'The film follows its titular talking primate after he escapes from a zoo and forms an unlikely bond with an eagle, a raccoon and a chameleon,' we read. We wish all of them the best. Not least the poor wee simian aviator.
Review: The Sound of Falling
The Sound of Falling
    
Director
:
Mascha Schilinski
Cert
:
None
Starring
:
Hanna Heckt, Susanne Wuest, Lena Urzendowsky, Luise Heyer, Filip Schnack, Greta Krämer, Laeni Geisler, Luzia Oppermann
Running Time
:
2 hrs 29 mins
It's hard to tell precisely where advance buzz comes from for Cannes entries from unrecognised directors. Leaks from industry boffins? Empty hype from the production itself?
Last year Payal Kapadia delivered on that buzz with her film All We Imagine as Light, the festival's eventual runner-up. The youngish German director Mascha Schilinski now does so again with a taxing, extraordinary film that, if we may be so pompous, sits comfortably in the tradition of austere European art house.
Weaving together experiences from four time frames in a remote German farmhouse, the picture has the cruelty of Ingmar Bergman and the ruthlessness of Michael Haneke (particularly that director's Palme d'Or-winning The White Ribbon). But there is also a wistful lightness to some sequences. One can hardly imagine the Swede or the Austrian staging an underwater sequence to a woozy dream-pop number by Anna von Hausswolff.
The Sound of Falling
There are sufficient mysteries here to defy easy plot synopsis and to invite more than one rewatch. This is a film about cruelty to women. Men too. One of the most striking sequences sees the family causing an older son to unwillingly suffer amputation of a leg so as to avoid conscription on the viscera-drenched eastern front.
The first scene, set later, references that incident with Erika (Lea Drinda), then a teenager, clumping down a corridor with one leg bound up to imitate her uncle's condition. Her father summons her down to tend the pigs and punches her in the face when she arrives late.
We then move backwards and forwards through time to chart a history of familial and societal dysfunction. Sometimes in Germany of the kaiser, sometimes of Hitler, sometimes of the German Democratic Republic, sometimes in the present democracy. In each section the camera, shooting in academy ratio, prowls like an unseen ghost. (Maybe that's what it is.)
Not everyone will be up for the deliberate narrative muddle or the sheer catastrophe of it all. There is not much forward movement here. But this remains a uniquely uneasy work that even its detractors will enjoy dissecting. The first time in many years that the first film in competition looks like a distinctly plausible Palme d'Or winner.
Review: The Left-Handed Girl
The Left-Handed Girl
    
Director
:
Shih-Ching Tsou
Cert
:
None
Starring
:
Janel Tsai, Shih-Yuan Ma, Nina Ye, Brando Huang, Akio Chen, Xin-Yan Chao
Running Time
:
1 hr 38 mins
It does a disservice to Shih-Ching Tsou, director of this delightful Taiwanese jewel, to begin with 'Sean Baker is back'. But the director, who produced Baker joints such as Red Rocket and The Florida Project (both Cannes premieres), will know that, a year after her friend triumphed with Anora, his presence as editor, coproducer and cowriter was sure to attract attention. Apologies.
To be honest, even if their names were not in the credits, critics would surely make comparisons to those collaborations. The Left-Handed Girl has the same freewheeling energy, the same unforced performances and, most notably, the same sure sense of place.
The Left-Handed Girl
This time we are in colourful, buzzing, funny Taipei with three generations of indomitable women. Shu-Fen (Janet Tsai) is the long-suffering mum to tearaway adult I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) and tiny, endlessly enchanting I-Jing (Nina Ye), the title character.
The poor wee girl listens too closely to her deadbeat grandad, husband of an internationally criminal mum, and, honouring an apparent Taiwanese myth, eventually accepts that her left-handedness is a sign of evil. So why not use that hand to disrupt, shoplift and generally cause mayhem? The hand is going to hell anyway.
Playing in the Critics' Choice strand, The Left-Handed Girl is a little lacking in order. We zoom randomly from one character to the next without much structure. But as a lighthearted character study and a vibrant advertisement for its home city it could scarcely be bettered. The place looks hectic and occasionally dangerous but always thrilling.
Review: Two Prosecutors
Two Prosecutors
    
Director
:
Sergei Loznitsa
Cert
:
None
Starring
:
Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Alexander Filippenko, Anatoli Beliy, Andris Keišs, Vytautas Kaniušonis
Running Time
:
1 hr 58 mins
Is there anything else to say about the cruelties of the Stalin era? Maybe not. But Sergei Loznitsa, a Cannes regular, finds gripping ways of walking through the old stories in a film that plays like two intense chamber pieces set amid the gloomiest of shorter interludes.
The film looks to be working in allegory even as it is relating incidents that could very well have happened. We begin with an elderly political prisoner in a Soviet jail being given a match and forced to burn a series of petitions to Stalin.
Two Prosecutors
One missive stands out and makes its way to the young, still idealistic (maybe naive) Kornyev, a prosecutor, played with handsome intensity by Aleksandr Kuznetsov. That takes him to a horrific interview with Stepniak (Alexander Filippenko), a once-proud Bolshevik who, his body now distorted by scars and hernias, refuses to confess to trumped-up crimes no matter how harsh the torture. He eventually persuades Kornyev to take his accusations to top brass in Moscow.
With the benefit of historical hindsight, we can see problems ahead.
The intense, taut film, which detractors may feel too close to a play, is good on the deceptions, evasions and hypocrisies of bureaucratic oppression. But it is better still on the lost potential of the idealistic comrades who forged the revolution. Wintry and worrying but, as is often the case with tales from Russia, infused with most fatalistic humour.