Cannes marks its 75th year in nostalgic form

From Maverick to Bowie to Elvis, the Cannes Film Festival launches its 75th-anniversary edition on Tuesday with a roster full of icons from the last century.

The world’s foremost film festival always tries to strike a balance between serious arthouse fare and popcorn-guzzling entertainment. 

It has scored some big crowd-pleasers for its diamond jubilee, with Tom Cruise coming to the French Riviera for the European launch of “Top Gun: Maverick”, the sequel to his era-defining mega-hit from 1986. 

The 79-year-old returns to his body-horror (dis)comfort zone with “Crimes of the Future”, in which Kristen Stewart, Lea Seydoux and Viggo Mortensen turn gruesome surgical alterations into a sexualised performance art.

Five films from women

Meanwhile, US filmmaker James Gray gets nostalgic for his New York adolescence in “Armageddon Time”, starring Anne Hathaway and Anthony Hopkins. 

And one of France’s directors, Claire Denis, is back with “The Stars at Noon”, a thriller set in Central America featuring Robert Pattinson. 

Following some last-minute additions, a total of 21 films are competing for the Palme d’Or, including several from previous winners: the Dardenne brothers from Belgium, Sweden’s Ruben Ostlund, Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda and Romania’s Cristian Mungiu.

Only five are directed by women -- though that still makes it a record year for female representation at Cannes -- among them US indie darling Kelly Reichardt who is presenting “Showing Up” with Michelle Williams.

Sadness, shame, pain

The war in Ukraine will be an inevitable talking point. 

Its beleaguered filmmakers will get a special day at the industry marketplace that runs alongside the festival and Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa will present a timely film out of competition, “The Natural History of Destruction”, about the bombing of German cities in World War II.

The main competition also includes Russia’s Kirill Serebrennikov, who was unable to attend for his two previous nominations due to a politically-charged conviction for embezzlement back home.

Now in exile, the director recently told AFP of the “horror, sadness, shame, pain” he felt about the invasion of Ukraine, which he said was an act of “self-killing” by the Russian government.