Back to normal at Cannes? Maybe. Yet the new normal, if there is one, won’t appear until next year.

Unlike the bumpy 2021 edition, this one wasn’t burdened by any Covid-19 regulation; however, changes of an altogether different kind are lying ahead. After the curtain goes down, the Cannes Film Festival will have a new president, and it is likely that the identity of the event, and notably its relation to the industry, won’t be unaffected by the replacement of someone like Pierre Lescure, the epitome of the famously idiosyncratic French media-business establishment, by Iris Knobloch, a former CEO of Warner Media. Globalisation is dead, long live globalisation? Maybe.

There are already signs of what the new direction for the festival will be. TikTok is now one of the main sponsors. Furthermore, the singularly aggressive policy of supporting local industry seen in last year’s edition is continuing. The sophomore efforts by Lukas Dhont (Close, Grand Prix award) and Léonor Serraille (Mother and Son) — the latter decidedly more inspired and imaginative than the former — come across as trendy, formulaic, undaring works featured in the main competition just because new Francophone auteurs need to be churned out by the Cannes machine on a regular basis, no matter their worth.

On the other hand, Cannes still does manage to launch genuine new talents. The 32-year-old Saeed Roustayi has astonished everyone with Leila’s Brothers, 165 minutes of pure drama and not a single empty moment, thanks to Roustayi’s uber-skilled pacing and old-school alternation of gripping, intricate dialogues and scenes of “respite” reflectively taking stock of what has just unfolded.

The most exciting parts of the world’s most prestigious film festival, the Cannes Film Festival, this year were not so much in the official competition for the Palme D’Or as in the equally respected independent sidebars

Leila’s Brothers had no need for phoney genre frameworks, as in Swedish-Iranian Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider (a somewhat silly attempt to investigate gender relations through the form of thriller) or Swedish-Egyptian Tarik Saleh’s Boy from Heaven (Best Screenplay award; a predictable film about power struggles in Cairo’s Al-Azhar university between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Al-Sisi regime, narrated through the usual A-manipulating-B-manipulating-C form, reminiscent of any Netflix series).

Rather, it was simply a touching story of relations between siblings, amidst an endless string of day-to-day economic transactions, projects, dreams and scams. Leila is smart, proactive, self-conscious; her brother realises that she could finally take their Teheran family out of poverty, but is too weak and too attached to his other useless brothers and his old, pitiful wannabe-patriarch of a father (an extraordinary character coming straight out of 19th century Russian literature) to actually stand by her side.

Leila’s Brothers global palatability is not far from Asghar Farhadi’s but, unlike the latter, Roustayi is no trickster: his filmmaking craft is authentic, and truly unassailable.

Waiting for the new Cannes with a new president, the 2022 competition has indulged in quite a few pleasant eccentricities. Little to no dialogues in Jury Prize winner EO, by Polish veteran Jerzy Skolimowski, remembered by many as The Avengers’ Georgi Luchkov. The film is merely the mute adventures of a donkey stranded across various parts of Europe, and operates as a metaphor of resilience with spiritual, nay biblical overtones.

With amazingly luscious visuals, the editing, framing, colours and camera movements, all work together to deliver an experience that is less mystical and more outright psychedelic. An orgy of motion, it is a sensual, ecstatic, coarse, never-ending, jolty flow that illustrates how our planet looks like when we look at it with the pristine, unadulterated gaze of an animal. Skolimowski regards it as the most fitting gaze to a world that is now more beastly than human.

Another old master, David Cronenberg, offered a slick, sophisticated, comprehensive summary of his entire career with Crimes of the Future, a dystopian fantasy in which the organic and inorganic, art and the human body become indistinguishable, as they both seek to incorporate otherness within themselves to survive.

Such themes have been explored by Cronenberg for more than 40 years, but now he adds a further question: what are the political conundrums of this post-humanity we are blindly rushing toward? Who owns bodily organs if bodies become subject to indefinite mutation? Who is entitled to handle them?

Treading on the same ground but more carefreely are cine-anthropologists Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel (De Humanis Corporis Fabrica, in the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs [Directors’ Fortnight] sidebar), who collate footage from real-life operating tables, displaying the interior of human bodies as an infinite source of aesthetic wonder; the textures of their skins, fluids and organs serving as an incomparable, if sometimes unbearable, spectacle.

The ultimate eccentricity was Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, set in French Polynesia, no longer a colony but an “overseas collectivity”. De Roller is a high commissioner of the French state and a true political animal, because he only inhabits grey areas: neither active nor passive, neither pro-colonialism nor pro-resistance, neither powerless nor powerful. This is not the film of a storyteller though, but that of a visual artist, submerged in a Beckettian aphasia, with the narrative reduced to a few sparse, opaque, incoherent fragments.

Rebellion is brewing, nuclear tests may be carried out by French authorities, but nothing in the film is made clear. All the emphasis is on dark blue nights, pink skies, green forests: rarefied, expertly composed tableaus following one another so as to suggest not time flowing, but rather time going nowhere, man thrown off centre, a Godot-esque paralysis. A feast for the eyes for sure, but also a rather trite worldview, a cheaply anarchist trope of the “all power is evil” variety. Postcoloniality is here simply an eye-pleasing background, not really the subject matter.

The same applies to Grand Prix winner Stars at Noon. Set amidst the burning tensions of 1980s Nicaragua, director Claire Denis chooses to deliberately overlook them and focus exclusively on the sensuality of bodies and of tropical vegetation, echoing her heroine’s choice to navigate her relationships with the inevitable CIA agent and a handsome, mysterious British militant by simply trusting her gut feelings.

Quite literally sticking to the trees to neglect the forest, Denis’s at once dreamy and overly physical style could have been a fruitful aesthetic parti pris, but turns out to be merely an all-too-easy way out of complexity.

Where Stars at Noon fails, Manuela Martelli’s 1976 (Quinzaine) delivers. Subtly embracing the painfully narrow perspective of an upper class woman in the aftermath of Chile’s Pinochet coup, who wants to help the rebels but is too comfortably prisoner of her golden cage to be able to, Martelli conveys a sentiment that is by now all-too-familiar anywhere.

Historical trauma does not need to directly involve us to actually shatter our perception of the world, making our daily experience into a bunch of incoherent details, with any of them at any given moment potentially pointing to how messed-up the “bigger picture” is, even if the totality falls outside our radars.

Other works, however, engage much more seriously with postcoloniality than Serra’s and Denis’s. No matter how much it changes on the surface, Naples will never be anything but a third world metropolis. So, by telling the story of an emigrant entrepreneur coming back after decades to his birthplace to come to terms with his troubled past, Mario Martone (Nostalgia) draws not only a splendid portrayal of his city, but also a convincing meditation on the identity of the third world — advocating a self-conscious, positive appropriation of its impermeability to modernity and well-intentioned reformation.

In a European context, modernity has always been inextricably linked to theatricality, and so Naples is filmed by Martone as an eternally unfulfilled promise of theatricality. Every street corner, every courtyard, appears on the verge of becoming a stage — but it never does. A city teeming with sensory excess, it constantly gives you the impression that something is about to happen. Yet nothing does, a city without a future. But Martone clings to his conviction that if ever there is a way out of the shortcomings of modernity, it must be sought in this futurelessness.

Another filmmaker believing that cinema can capture the secret soul of society that is hidden in plain sight in the enigmas of urban space, is the young and very promising Youssef Chebbi. The elliptical thriller narrative of his Ashkal (Quinzaine) is less important than its background: the monumental, creepy, unfinished buildings of the Gardens of Carthage, a well-to-do neighbourhood north of Tunis whose construction was interrupted after the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ rebellions. The setting encapsulates a sense of political/existential uncertainty, aptly enhanced by Chebbi through his remarkable flair for visual orchestration.

There is no point in trying to identify a logic behind the awards: as always, there is none. Triangle of Sadness, Ruben Ostlund’s incomprehensible second Palme d’Or in a row (after The Square) is a gross, ideologically conformist satire clumsily disguised as radicalism, embarrassingly passing off a few clichés on the rich and the poor as some kind of Marxist critique.

A much better choice was the Best Director Award to Korean Park Chan-Wook. His best in at least a dozen years, Decision to Leave is an exciting, exquisitely surprising, vertiginously manneristic, post-post-Hitchcockian neo-noir playing cat-and-mouse with the viewer at every moment. It digresses from its main narrative strand at every new editing cut, only to find itself right in the middle of it; tricking the audience into believing this is yet another upstanding-detective-meets-mortally-dangerous-femme-fatale kind of thing, but then of course it goes elsewhere, even as far as outright romcom.

It then returns to noir territory, but isn’t noir film always some kind of romantic comedy in disguise? Isn’t noir always about that inextricability between cold manipulativeness and warm passion, which Decision to Leave so brilliantly and unpredictably expounds on?

Of course, the most welcome of Cannes awards was not in the main competition, but in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ [In Perspective] sidebar, where the Jury Prize went to Saim Sadiq’s Joyland. The award had been in the air since the exceptionally emotional premiere on May 23, ending in tears on the parts of the cast as well as of the audience.

Within ‘Un Certain Regard’, no other film before and after it could stand the comparison. Cannes has long given up its traditional vocation of expanding the geographical horizons of cinema, but it cannot be said that, at least in 2022, it hasn’t looked in the right direction, at the very right moment. Let’s hope it’s just the beginning.

Published in Dawn, ICON, June 5th, 2022