The omens are bright ahead of the Cannes film festival. The sun shines, the Med sparkles and the delegates behave like excited kids on Christmas morning. They come pouring out of the hotels and apartments on the opening day, with a spring in their step and a song in their hearts, eager to throw themselves headlong at the movie theatres. The world is their oyster; nothing’s going to stop them. Nothing, that is, except the security gates.
The security gates are a new addition, springing up overnight outside the doors to the Palais, the vast brutalist conference centre on the Croisette. I suspect they might be here to stay. Security has ramped up in the wake of the Nice terror attack. Airspace and road space have been restricted; local police kitted with new semi-automatic handguns. Only last year the place still felt like a playground. The revellers could largely come and go as they pleased. Now they have to stand in line, loading their belongings into plastic trays before being herded one by one through security, like terrified passengers boarding an international flight. No doubt the measures are necessary; they may be a comfort. But they do make a festival feel marginally less festive.
While it remains to be seen whether the schedule reflects these tense, uncertain times, the early signs suggest it will. Once through the gates, we’re slapped with Loveless, the opening film of the Palme d’Or competition, ringing with apocalyptic portents and geopolitical tremors. Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev should have won the top prize for the magnificent Leviathan in 2014. His latest thunders into town like an angel of vengeance, spinning the tale of a warring Moscow couple so immersed in their own gleeful drama that it takes a full two days before they realise that their 12-year-old son has absconded. The subsequent search carries them through a virtual nuclear winter of blighted woodland, abandoned buildings and desolate country roads that may well lead to hell. Loveless is brilliant, it’s brutal, and watching it takes its toll. The delegates staggered out as though they’d just been tenderised with meat hammers.
Then there was Kornél Mundruczó’s Jupiter’s Moon, which finds bold new angles into the migrant crisis to serve up a rum, quasi-religious thriller about a disgraced medic who takes a miracle boy under his wing. Aryan (Zsombor Jéger) is a Syrian out of Homs, the son of a carpenter (and reputed terrorist), who possesses the ability to levitate at will. Some idiots booed this but I rather liked it. Jupiter’s Moon is fun and exuberant, if a trifle overegged, and I relished Merab Ninidze’s performance as the cynical doctor who claims to be too devout for the Bible. “I don’t read that stuff,” he tells the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “There’s a lot of violence and sex outside marriage.”
Hopes were high for Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, featuring the excellent Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams, but the movie feels a faint letdown after 2015’s Carol. Adapted from Brian Selznick’s illustrated novel, this is basically a kids’ film dressed in adult clothes; wide-eyed and knowing. It’s about two hearing-impaired children from different eras (1927 and 1977) who each set forth on pilgrimages to New York. Haynes’s parallel plots bounce pleasantly off one another and then come snugly (even smugly) together amid the splendour of the American Museum of Natural History. Ostensibly they’ve come to admire the exhibits. Mainly they’re just admiring themselves in the glass.
Still, at least Wonderstruck is coherent. That’s more than can be said for Ismael’s Ghosts, starring Mathieu Amalric as a disreputable director and Marion Cotillard as his wayward wife – missing, believed dead – who suddenly barrels back into his life. What a curious, eccentric, maddeningly French affair this is. It reminded me of my favourite mistranslation on the English-language menu of a local cafe: a dish that advertises itself, mystifyingly, as “ox dimensions, one person”. Ismael’s Ghosts is no disaster but its rich, meaty chunks are all over the place. They’re too much for one film; too much for this person.
Loveless leads the charge in the opening days, except that this Cannes still feels freshly opened. Over the coming week we’ll be lavished with new work from the likes of Lynne Ramsay and Michael Haneke, together with quadruple helpings of Nicole Kidman. Until then, early controversy has been provided by the decision to include two Netflix titles (the spry and winning Okja and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories) in the main competition. Opponents claim the presence of the streaming giant is at odds with Cannes’s ethos of supporting French cinemas; the French Federation of Film Distributors says it “endangers a whole ecosystem”. Jury president Pedro Almodóvar has already suggested he would resist handing the top prize to a Netflix production. Jury member Will Smith, by contrast, can’t see the problem. Who on earth knows how this particular spat will play out? Right now the judges are singing from separate hymn sheets.
One consequence of having to queue in front of the gates is that many delegates appear to have pitched camp inside the festival site. If it’s such a faff getting in, there’s no point popping out. And this is fine, because the Cannes Palais contains multitudes and is fiendishly fascinating. It’s honeycombed with secret doors and hidden lifts, screening rooms and a bustling marché. I’ve been coming for 12 years and have hardly begun to unpick all its mysteries. The Palais may very well expand and mutate by the month. Over dinner one night, the talk is all of the secret cafeteria, two floors underground, almost impossible to locate. Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw claims to have been led there once and then struggled to find the stairs back out. I vow that at some point during this festival I’m going to search for it too.
In this way, perhaps, we’ve already made peace with Cannes’s increased security, indulging in a cineaste version of Stockholm syndrome. The gates are a nuisance but they point the way to a nirvana of market stalls and cafes, flying Syrians and ghostly wives. I’m choosing to view them as teleportation devices, like something out of a sci-fi B-movie, complete with blinking lights and ominous beeps. Each one is a portal to an outlandish new world.
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