by Helen Barlow
I can’t remember the Cannes Festival announcing its programme so early as it did this year, and 2022 is an election year in France, which means the festival takes place a week later than usual.
Clearly, Festival director Thierry Fremaux was excited regarding what he had in store as the 75th edition celebrates not only a return to cinemas but the return of high-profile films like Top Gun: Maverick, which is finally releasing in May following numerous date changes. Then there are two Australian out of competition entries Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, which filmed in Queensland; and George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing which filmed in western Sydney and is apparently as far from Mad Max as one might imagine.
A further Australian entry is The Stranger, actor-director Thomas M. Wright’s second feature after 2018’s Acute Misfortune. A See-Saw production, it will screen in the Un Certain Regard sidebar and stars Joel Edgerton, who was in Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby which opened the Festival in 2013 as Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! had done in 2001.
While more competition films will be added next week and the poster and juries were not ready for the announcement, the Director’s Fortnight and Critics Week programmes are still to come, so there is potential for further Australian entries.
As usual, many of the competition titles come from Cannes regulars. David Cronenberg’s Canadian film Crimes of the Future re-teams the director with his regular actor Viggo Mortensen, who has said in interviews that Cronenberg is returning to the body horror of his original movies. Cronenberg’s 1996 movie Crash, which premiered in Cannes, was clearly an influence on last year’s winner Julia Ducournau’s Titane. Two-time Cannes winners, Belgium’s Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne return with Tori and Lokita, while Sweden’s Ruben Ostlund who won in 2017 for The Square, returns with the Greece-set, English-language Triangle of Sadness starring Woody Harrelson as the captain of a cruise ship. Claire Denis likewise works in English with Stars at Noon starring Margaret Qualley.
Belgium’s Lukas Dhont, who made a splash in Cannes with 2018’s Girl, makes his way into the competition for the first time with Close. James Gray’s Armageddon Time draws on the director growing up in Queens in the 1980s and stars Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway and Succession’s Jeremy Strong. In Showing Up Kelly Reichardt continues her interest in the little seen side of America and re-teams with her frequent star Michelle Williams.
South Korea looms large in the competition with Park Chan-wook returning with the mystery thriller Decision to Leave while Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda will compete with the Korea-shot, Korean-language Broker featuring Song Kang-ho, the star of the 2019 Cannes winner Parasite.
The opening film screening out of competition is The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius’s zombie movie Z, which was to originally screen in Sundance but was withdrawn after the festival went virtual with the onslaught of the Omicron virus. Here’s hoping festivals can now continue as normal. This year’s Venice, the oldest festival, celebrates its 90th anniversary and is rearing to go as well.
The 2022 Cannes Festival runs 17-28 May 2022
