According to many, the pandemic has killed, among others, the very idea of globalisation. Indeed, the strikingly self-centered and uncoordinated reactions of most countries vis à vis the global danger may be read as a demonstration that, when push comes to shove, every country just plays its own game.

The 74th edition of the Cannes Film Festival comes across as a testament to that. This time, with an unprecedented 30+ French features in the Official Selection, the first point on the agenda of this most global of festivals was undoubtedly the re-launch of the national film industry, after an obviously rough couple of years.

No less clearly, agenda item no. 2 was the promotion of a new, far-reaching, aggressive strategy for French-led international co-productions.

Many Franco-African titles entered the past few decades’ main line-ups, like this year’s Lingui by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun: a classically melodramatic, limpidly staged maternal soap opera scrutinising women’s condition and potential emancipation in one specific Muslim context (present-day Chad).

The 74th edition of the Cannes Film Festival seemed primarily focused on revitalizing the French film industry after a rough couple of years due to Covid-19

But other Franco-something products, such as Onoda (Philippine/Japan) and H6 (China) show that the French industry is setting out to radically diversify and expand its international efforts. Ironically, the Golden Palm went to a French film decidedly looking westward: Julia Ducournau’s belatedly postmodern melodrama Titan refashions the stylisation of violence and bodily horror of the Tarantino-Cronenberg-Refn-etc variety, not without uber-calculated contrivances, but still with remarkable visual skillfulness.

Does this trend have any political implication? Too early to tell. But one thing is clear: there are two different ways for French, nay, European identity to engage in the global cultural arena.

One is typically misguided: the construction of a straw man, an “Other”, a virtual enemy. Take Russia. Lately, Western media have increasingly posed as finicky when it comes to stereotypical representations; yet when it comes to portraying countries such as Russia, you can safely use an appalling amount of clichés and still be awarded a Cannes Gran Prix, like Juho Kuosmanen’s shamelessly orientalist Compartment no. 6.

On the one hand, the festival has overlooked Russian master Aleksey German Jr. for 20 years before inviting him for the first time in the “Un Certain Regard” sidebar, arguably just because his House Arrest deals with a dissident, and only secondly for its literary refinement and the artistry of its scenic designs.

On the other hand, the mediocre Kirill Serebrennikov is repeatedly welcomed in the main competition, only because the regime put him under house arrest. To be fair, his Petrov’s Flu is not without merits, as it translates for the screen Russian postmodern literature with some cleverness. Yet, in order to stage post-Soviet entropic chaos, Serebrennikov chooses the easy way out, annoyingly indulging in one shortcut after the other (cheap shocks, pseudo-inventive digressions, stylistic flamboyance), as opposed to orchestrating this mess with something resembling proper film direction.

Another, much more accomplished attempt to package national literary glory (Haruki Murakami), Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (Best Screenplay Award) is a meticulous, insightful, highly self-conscious, obsessively controlled, delightfully slick literary edifice, hell-bent on elucidating character relations through stylistic subtleties while minimising drama — amply borrowing from Cechov and other highbrow cultural milestones — to explore a theme inevitably popular in 2021: death and mourning.

A painful loss also informs Annette (Best Direction Award), that of Leos Carax’s former partner Natasha Golubeva. A deliriously eccentric musical starring hipster axiom Adam Driver, Annette is a fictional reinvention of Carax’s own tragedy, condensed and displaced, dream-like, in the most readably psychoanalytic of ways. Yet, there is nothing depressing or gloomy in Carax’s navel-gazing, but a lot of enjoyable, explosive imaginativeness.

Intriguingly, while Russia’s human rights’ policy was widely lamented, nothing stood in the way of programming a film, in “Un Certain Regard”, explicitly eulogising Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, someone hardly ever celebrated as a human rights champion. In Commitment Hasan by Semih Kaplanoğlu (a self-declared Erdoğan supporter), Kuruluş Osman’s Umut Karadağ plays a farmer whose timeless serenity is initially threatened by the electricity company requisitioning part of his land.

It is then eventually restored by Levantine pragmatism and the quietly unscrupulous moral chicaneries of Hasan’s labyrinthine, stubborn negotiations with bureaucrats and neighbours. An allegory of the Turkish leader? No doubts are left when Hasan deprecates Europe’s double-standard apropos pesticides, notwithstanding Kaplanoğlu’s reluctance to acknowledge the analogy.

Controversial as they may be, propaganda films can be highly interesting, and even their shortcomings can be significant. This film’s very failure to synthesise an artsy, pictorial, contemplatively slow style with the drab dramatics of everyday politics, ultimately alerts the spectator to things being complicated, and unsuited to be looked at from one perspective only. When their subject matter is explored in-depth, through contradictions, complexities and nuances, even propaganda films have nothing to be apologetic about.

Nor is there anything apologetic about a deeply Christian film such as Benedetta, grossly mistaken by some for a piece of anti-Christian blasphemy for showing lesbian sex in a medieval convent. If anything, this is the right way for European identity to engage in the global cultural arena: not by making straw men out of others, but by critically examining its own legacy.

Not many could be up to this task more than Paul Verhoeven, who not only scattered several Christological references across more than 40 years of films (even in box office hits such as 1987’s RoboCop), but also authored an academically impeccable 300-page historical biography of Jesus himself. For Benedetta, a theologically sound meditation on the Body/Spirit relationship and on the concrete presence of both in everyday power dynamics, Verhoeven found a perfectly suitable style: his usual vigorous, in-your-face frankness, moving headlong through contradictions, complexities and nuances.

What about the rest of the world? Too closely entangled with the stakeholders gravitating around it (sales agencies, development labs, funding institutions etc.), this festival cannot but regard the global margins as an endless source not quite of cinematic discoveries, but rather of business opportunities and investments, whose outputs Cannes is expected to display as a glamorous shop window.

The most prestigious of them, Memoria by arthouse superstar Apichatpong Weerasethekul, sharing the Jury Prize with Nadav Lapid’s disgustingly self-indulgent Ahed’s Knee, suggests that so-called “global South” may be at the forefront of a new world, one that is post-human, post-optical, post-organic, post-lots-of-things.

With a renowned Chinese filmmaker (Jia Zhang-Ke) co-producing, an international cast (Tilda Swinton), Colombian settings and a Thai director, Memoria crystallises — through catatonic, quasi-comatose rhythms and gorgeously designed visual compositions of imposing stillness — the ongoing mutation of human sensory apparatus, increasingly similar to that of machines, animals, vegetables, and stones even.

Nothing that contemporary art hasn’t been extensively mapping for decades now, but with an exquisitely cinematic sensibility, i.e. a focus not only on the material fabric of perceptual experience, but also on its shared, social side. After all, film is a communal experience, not a private stroll to the museum.

Thankfully, the parallel festival “Quinzaine des Realisateurs” still strives to genuinely broaden our geographical scope — the Subcontinent included. A daring compromise between the very personal and the very political, Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing blends avant-garde material with footage from anti-Modi student rallies, unfortunately with less editorial command than required, verging sometimes on shapelessness and redundancy.

In the “Un Certain Regard” section, Bangladeshi Abdullah Mohammad Saad signs a moral drama reminiscent of Asghar Farhadi, with a likewise clear-minded and strong-handed direction — but also a likewise tendency to overdo the film’s dramaturgy. With admirable lucidity, Rehana Maryam Noor analytically dissects a social environment that crushes women under unfair family responsibilities, professional marginalisation, structural male impunity and a lot more.

The protagonist, a young teacher struggling in vain against her boss’s sexual abuses to have them publicly acknowledged and punished, is the exclusive focus of the film: to support her upright stubbornness while highlighting her occasional naiveties and shortcomings, the camera sticks to her from very close, virtually at all times.

The film, however, is ultimately impaired by this deliberate narrowness: if she is portrayed as irretrievably isolated from her environment, why should she fight to change it? Conversely, and much more convincingly, Jonas Carpignano’s eponymous heroine (A Chiara, in “Quinzaine”) is consistently framed as part and parcel of the world she’s bitterly discovering at 15: an Italian town in which 100 percent of the people are involved in mafia activities, including her beloved father. Result: greater ambiguity, greater conflicts, greater emotion. In one word: better drama.

Farhadi himself got the Grand Prix with one of his trademark, all-too-well-written moral tales (A Hero). Expect the expected, and nothing more: this applied, alas, to most of the main competition generally. Exception: Bruno Dumont’s magisterial France, a whacky, sophisticated parable bashing media manipulation while denying the viewer the satisfaction of relying on an easy answer as to where the truth lies.

Dumont goes as far as implying that his own brutally raw, highbrow, austere, hyperrealist style might be just another elaborate lie, no less than any reality show. Yet truth does emerge in the end, an unpleasantly social truth.

Moral of the story: cynicism and innocence might go hand-in-hand — a paradox well known to festival-goers. As Dumont scans faces and landscapes in search of a glimpse of truth behind mediatised surfaces, Cannes aficionados plunge in this disproportionate, cynical media circus, looking for improbable residues of genuine cinema.

Even in the blandest editions (like 2021’s), this search is never totally in vain.

Marco Grosoli teaches film at Habib University, and has been covering most of the major European film festivals since 2003

Published in Dawn, ICON, August 1st, 2021