At this year’s Cannes festival there is a new musical signature, almost supplanting the Saint-Saëns theme which traditionally prefaces every film. I’ve heard it in almost every movie here, and it’s a harbinger of bad news.
But it’s in real life too. It’s an insidious, unsettling, panicky tune that happens on screen and off, in the streets, part of movies, part of our lives. We hardly know we’re hearing it, but it’s all around us, a tune that menacingly, paranoically signals something malign. And that tune is Opening (Default) by Vince Cantrell. It’s the bog-standard ringtone on the iPhone 7, a jagged little marimba figure, endlessly remixed online: characters’ phones in movies are always playing it, and it’s sharp, clamorous, a bad omen. Someone is going to do something dramatic. Or nasty.
And when we in the audience hear the unmistakable jarring notes of Opening (Default) we stir, guiltily, because for a moment we think it’s our phone. It’s the office. Oh, boy. We’re in trouble. Because everyone knows that the mobile never rings with good news. This tune is worse than the Jaws theme. It’s the new music of our harassed, wary times.
A culture chief who cares
I’ve been coming to Cannes for almost 20 years, but I’ve never felt more pro-French. The victory of Emmanuel Macron has put a different savour in the air: something triumphantly relaxed and politically confident, going well beyond our poignantly defeated yearning for le Brexit doux.
The festival is looking forward to welcoming the new culture minister, Françoise Nyssen, a former publisher and director of the Actes Sud imprint. Imagine it! A culture minister who has the eccentricity of … knowing and caring about culture.
And I’ve been moved by the hugely and instinctively generous reaction to the Manchester outrage here. Festival director Thierry Frémaux ordered a minute’s silence in the Palais on Tuesday afternoon and other festival delegates have been coming up to the Brits to offer sympathies.
In fact, there was a security scare here a few days ago. A stray bag in the auditorium triggered an alarm and we were all turfed out for half an hour. And France itself has suffered terrible terrorist outrages. Yet for all that, I haven’t found the aggressive alarmism that the cynics and grizzled realist insist must be there, and that the terrorists want. It feels like a country still basically at ease with others and itself.
Love for Lloyd Webber
There is very big cultural news in Cannes. Andrew Lloyd Webber has become respectable overnight. The festival scheduled 24 Frames, the mesmeric posthumous film from the late, great Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami – an experimental curation of 24 dreamlike images, inspired by great artworks and accompanied by music. And the final piece of music was … Lloyd Webber’s stirringly emotional Love Never Dies, the title song to the sequel to The Phantom of the Opera.
Did Kiarostami sign off on that choice? Or did he include it the way Stanley Kubrick repeatedly cast Leonard Rossiter in his movies – not knowing or caring about the pop-culture associations. Was the great Iranian director, in fact, a massive Lloyd Webber fan?
It’s an open question. But why not? He loved playful popular music: that was how he ended his great film Taste of Cherry (with a Louis Armstrong adaptation). If we think Lloyd Webber’s music is naff, maybe we’re the ones destined to get egg on our faces, like people who once derided Abba.
But there’s no doubt about it: Andrew Lloyd Webber is an integral part of one of the most highly regarded films at this year’s Cannes. So for his critical reputation, the only way is up.
