CANNES, France — When Jeff Nichols first attended the Cannes Movie Pageant, he was a 21-year-old school pupil interning on the occasion’s American Pavilion. His days have been largely spent ready tables, however once in a while, Nichols obtained his fingers on a premiere ticket, donned a tuxedo that his mom had purchased him, and took a seat excessive within the balcony of the Grand Théâtre Lumière. Each time he landed there, he felt he was on the summit of every little thing he wished to do in life.
Since then, Nichols has come again to the pageant with two movies he directed: “Take Shelter,” starring Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain, and the Matthew McConaughey drama “Mud.” This yr, he’ll function one of many jurors deciding the winner of the Palme d’Or. At a jury information convention on Tuesday, the now 43-year-old Nichols declared his invitation to be a full-circle honor.
“I can assure you that I’m going to look at each one in every of these movies with the identical enthusiasm as once I was 21,” Nichols mentioned.
The moderator, Didier Allouch, added dryly, “You’ll have a greater seat.”
In its seventy fifth yr, an invite to the Cannes Movie Pageant stays extremely coveted, even when the film business has modified irrevocably within the twenty years since Nichols first attended. Since French theaters foyer the pageant to exclude streaming movies from competitors, Cannes generally looks as if a throwback: a spot the place the massive display is so revered that you simply’d hardly know the surface world consumes artwork movies on a lot smaller screens, if in any respect.
Probably the most vital concession Cannes has made to altering viewer habits is the abundance of billboards and banners alongside the Croisette, town’s important boulevard, touting the short-form video app TikTok, an official accomplice for this yr’s pageant. Does that union counsel that the pageant is hedging its cinematic bets, or is it merely a savvy manner for Cannes to succeed in a person base of over a billion younger customers?
Perhaps it’s a reminder that Cannes has extra to promote than simply artwork movies, even when a few of these entries — just like the Palme d’Or winner “Parasite,” or final yr’s hit “The Worst Particular person within the World” — go on to strike a cultural chord. Cannes sells glamour, too, within the type of red-carpet photos which might be beamed throughout the globe. And the picture-perfect backdrop of the Croisette, the place that purple carpet is ready off by an azure summer time sky and a fair richer blue sea, additionally affords the right launchpad for studio blockbusters: “High Gun: Maverick” and Baz Luhrmann’s glitzy “Elvis” will debut at Cannes this yr alongside indies like Kelly Reichardt’s “Displaying Up,” starring Michelle Williams as an artist caring for a wounded pigeon.
After the 74th version of the pageant was constrained by the emergence of the Delta variant of the coronavirus, this yr’s Cannes is the fest again at its most maximal. The variety of journalists right here has practically tripled since final summer time, the events are as soon as towards bustling, and the opening night-film, “Last Lower,” was directed by a big-name Cannes alum — the French director Michel Hazanavicius, whose movie “The Artist” debuted right here in 2011 earlier than occurring to win the best-picture Oscar.
Hazanavicius has skilled all of the ups and downs that Cannes has to supply: Three years after his victory with “The Artist,” he returned with the warfare drama “The Search,” which earned such derisive boos and whistles at its press screening that the movie barely escaped the Croisette alive. Nonetheless, Hazanavicius couldn’t keep away: Although his zombie comedy “Last Lower” was initially imagined to premiere on the Sundance Movie Pageant in January, the movie pivoted to Cannes when Sundance went all-virtual.
“I really feel like I used to be born in Cannes for ‘The Artist,’ however I died in Cannes for ‘The Search,’” Hazanavicius instructed IndieWire this week. “It’s a poker sport. You come together with your playing cards however you by no means know.”
And also you come as a result of when Cannes connects, there’s nothing else prefer it. Maybe that’s why the opening ceremony for the pageant on Tuesday evening was in a position to land a big-name shock visitor: President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who appeared through satellite tv for pc. In his navy fatigues, he spoke to the couture-clad crowd in regards to the energy of cinema to reshape what we consider warfare and the individuals who wage it. Quoting Charlie Chaplin’s “The Nice Dictator,” Zelensky mentioned, “The hate of males will go, and dictators die, and the facility they took from the folks will return to the folks.”
As he spoke, I believed again to the jury information convention, the place the jurors — who embrace the actress-director Rebecca Corridor and the jury president Vincent Lindon, who starred in final yr’s Palme d’Or winner, “Titane” — have been requested whether or not movie nonetheless retains any cultural primacy in a world dominated by the likes of, properly, TikTok. One other jury member, “The Worst Particular person within the World” director Joachim Trier, leaped in to say that moviemaking is “a really radiant, progressive artwork kind that all of us love.” Then he grinned.
“Individuals say that it’s dying,” Trier mentioned. “I don’t imagine it for a second.”