It’s been five years since the Cannes Film Festival — along with pretty much every other major public gathering — was canceled because of the worldwide Covid pandemic, a dismal interlude now relegated to the history books. But haunting memories of the wreckage caused by the pandemic and its subsequent lockdowns seeped back into the festival’s Grand Theatre Lumière Friday night as writer/director Ari Aster’s Eddington had its world premiere.
Aster, 38, who made his name with upscale horror movies Hereditary and Midsommar, tackles even more disquieting fears in his latest film from the envelope-pushing A24. Set in May of 2020 in the fictional town of Eddington, New Mexico — Aster was born in New York and raised in Santa Fe from age 10 — the movie revolves around a sheriff, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who’s introduced during an argument about wearing masks. It begins as something of a black comedy and then evolves into something much, much darker as the upheaval of that pandemic year is unleashed: The town is divided over the shut-down rules; ubiquitous social media further exacerbates the situation; everyone pulls out an iPhone and points it at their neighbor; conspiracy theorists infiltrate susceptible minds; some of the town’s kids performatively confess their own white privilege as they join Black Lives Matter protests; guns pop up everywhere; pedophiles are cited as a constant threat; and Antifa is said to lurk just over the horizon. It’s not always clear where Aster’s sympathies lie, but no one escapes unscathed.
Aster put Phoenix through an emotional and physical wringer in their last film together, 2023’s Beau Is Afraid, and he ups the ante relentlessly in this new film. Phoenix’s conservative sheriff launches a campaign for mayor that pits him against a long-standing, more progressive rival (Pedro Pascal), even as he’s losing his wife (Emma Stone) to a YouTube cult leader (Austin Butler). From there, it all spins violently out of control.
Why this film and why now? Aster was asked this question when he sat on Saturday for the fest’s official press conference. “I wrote this film in a state of fear and anxiety about the world, and I wanted to try to pull back and describe, show what it feels like to live in a world where nobody can agree on what is real anymore,” he said, continuing, “That social force that used to be kind of central in liberal mass democracies, which is an agreed upon version of the world, that is gone now and Covid felt like the moment where that link was finally cut for good. I wanted to make a film about what America feels like to me, and what it felt like at that time, and it felt bad.”
If the film ends on a grim note — more than one, actually — that’s because, Aster explained, “I think we’re on a dangerous road, and I think we’re living through an experiment that has gone wrong, it’s not going well, it feels like there is no way out of it.” He repeated several times, as if adopting a mantra, “We need to re-engage with each other.”
Eddington, scheduled for release July 18, is bound to be divisive. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney called the movie “annoying and empty,” while the BBC’s Nicholas Barber credited it with “gonzo high-adrenaline fun that leaves you reeling and breathless.”
Clearly, Aster’s latest is not going to be everyone’s cup of arsenic. But if you believe the U.S. is going to hell, Eddington plays like a damning road map to that final destination.
After more than 100 days of Trump, intractable situations in the Ukraine and Gaza, leave it to Cannes to give us the dopamine hits we need. The tapis rouge, as the French call it, has been heaving with celebrities. Photographers perch themselves up and down step ladders three rows deep on the sidewalks to capture a bevy of film, fashion and music stars whose images are now a welcome counterpoint to doomscrolling ICE raids on TikTok.
Kering’s Women in Motion event on Saturday featured Charlotte Gainsbourg, who stars in Prime Video’s Étoile, and on May 18, Nicole Kidman will receive the initiative’s 10th annual award. Sure, the Hollywood studios have pulled back on the multi-million dollar promotional events of yesteryear. (Network TV news crews covered Roman Polanski’s Pirates extravaganza in 1986 for an entire week, a former correspondent tells me.) While Cannes can provide a lift-off for an Oscar best picture like Parasite or Anora, it’s puzzling that the big streamers, Netflix and Amazon, are practically invisible here. Perhaps they are saving their marketing dollars for next month when the advertisers descend for Cannes Lions, which increasingly has become the default “Cannes” for American media executives.
Fashion companies have amped up their presence where studios have stepped back. One hip French company, Ami Paris, is a sponsor of Cannes’ Critics Week section. Dior and jewelry brand Chopard are spending big to sponsor events here too, as is Mastercard, an official partner with branding on festival badges. At the Majestic opposite the Palais, bags of clothing and bunches of flowers are delivered all day long by the likes of Balenciaga and Gucci. It’s hard to know who’s wearing what except for Kristen Stewart in Chanel, who’s made numerous dress changes to show off Coco’s classic tweeds. One new company, Reborn Studio, announced its launch this week with a mission to pair luxury fashion brands together with top directors and filmmakers for projects (à la Saint Laurent’s backing of last year’s Emilia Pérez). Reborn co-founder Laure Parleani tells me the fashion business is expanding in film in a big way and said she supports the festival’s dress code prohibiting nude or voluminous gowns, which “take too much space” on crowded carpets, she said. “It’s not the Met Gala.”
The networking events list put together by the UK’s Main Attraction Films and shared around by all is extraordinarily long; every business meeting with a glass of wine is dubbed a party. One movie industry lawyer, Hannah Wylie of Spring Tide Media, is a regular here and told me that even when she’s attending possibly the highest-profile events of the festival, she always feels a sense of something else going on, somewhere else. Even though Cannes runs longer than a week, the FOMO is real. Most of the prime night activities get going around 10 p.m., an ideal hour for attendees from California, where it’s still lunchtime.
The Bono biodoc for streamer AppleTV+, Stories of Surrender, unspooled Friday night at the Palais, where the festival’s efforts to keep politics out of the frame have gone about as well as its big-dress ban — that is to say, mostly ignored. In an interview with the AP Bono, who lives part time in a rose-colored villa in the paradise village of Èze-Sur-Mer, shared his sad philosophy that “the world has never been closer to a world war in my lifetime.”
Luckily Bono was in a more upbeat mood on the red carpet, wearing round rose-tinted glasses for the premiere, wife Alison Hewson by his side. Also attending were supermodel Helena Christensen and Sean Penn. Elsewhere on the red carpet, Emma Stone, Austin Butler and Pedro Pascal fought off every publicist’s worst nightmare, the worst kind of buzz — a bee causing a commotion in the middle of the red carpet for Aster’s Eddington.
One of the remarkable things about Cannes is that it encourages people to come from every corner of the world. Thousands of youngsters pour off the Zou trains with dreams about being in films or making them and just being part of the melee in their best frocks and suits hoping for a lucky break. On the train I met Petar Djordjevic, a former content moderator for a social network he didn’t name. Djordejevic won accreditation to the Cannes Market event and was looking for help to get a project made about the internment of Japanese Americans in the U.S. during World War II. Born in the former Yugoslavia and now living in Spain, he said he understood the feeling of being displaced and wanted to explore the topic of identity. He had spent his afternoon watching Mission Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie and surprise guest Tom Cruise talked about some of the film’s more challenging stunts. Who would Djordjevic most like to direct his nascent project? “Martin Scorsese,” he smiled.
In a little garden just off the Croisette, Screen International hosted a cocktail hour where I talked to the co-writer of the movie The Vampyre, a production with Malcolm McDowell and Derek Jacobi attached. Rosanna Hamlin, wearing a crown of roses, told me about her serious addiction to gothic novels and the writer Mary Shelley. “I love this. I live for this,” she told me of her obsession with things that can’t be explained. She got her start through a connection to the director Trisha Ward, made in their London neighborhood during Covid lockdown.
Whether the about-to-be-married Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sànchez had arrived on dry land was hard to ascertain. There were plenty of social media posts about their yacht, the Koru, on the horizon. The Daily Mail ran a story about a look-alike couple who had hit the red carpet and fooled photo agencies. Sànchez is slated to receive a women’s empowerment award on Monday night at Eva Longoria-helmed Global Gift Gala. You can still buy tickets if you’ve got €5,500 to spare.
Its inaugural edition will run concurrently with TIFF. → Click here to keep reading
It’s designed to boost regional collaboration. → Click here to keep reading
Antonio Banderas to appear in the film, shooting in London. → Click here to keep reading
David Lowery directing adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel. → Click here to keep reading
Joey Palmroos wrote and directed the thriller. → Click here to keep reading
The Chronology Of Water is a delicate biopic. → Click here to keep reading
Critic Tim Grierson calls Ari Aster’s film wan and hyperbolic. → Click here to keep reading
Andrew Dominik filmed the doc for Apple TV+. → Click here to keep reading
Some gala tix are going for $6,000 each. → Click here to keep reading
How he steered the project to Jennifer Lawrence. → Click here to keep reading
The long-running Screen International Jury Grid is a critical ranking of competition films in Cannes, according to an assembled jury of 12 international film critics, including Screen‘s reviewers (four stars is the top rating). Ari Aster’s Eddington has recorded the lowest score so far on Screen’s Cannes jury grid, while Hafsia Herzi’s The Little Sister lands with a middling average. → Click here for the full grid.
Day 1: ‘Art Is a Threat’ as Oscar Race, the Resistance, Begin
Day 2: ‘Prices are Crazy’; Cruise ❤️
Day 3: KStew Debut; IMAX CEO on Nolan; Screen Jury Grid Starts!
