With Ingrid Bergman gazing from the poster, the 68th Cannes Film Festival opens tonight, carrying the usual weight of the world's premier battleground of cinema as art, commerce and glamour.
The opening film is French teen drama La Tete Haute. For the next 10 days, we'll read about and see photos of parades of stars, red-carpet fashion, possible controversies, flurries of eulogy and criticism, with the focus on the 19 films in the elite competition, considered by many the toughest in cinema. Every year, over 3,000 journalists arrive at the French Riviera asking the same question: "Will this year be a vintage one?"
Last year's edition was solid though uneventful, compared to, say, the 2013 spectacle of Blue Is the Warmest Colour. This year's line-up, altogether around 40 films, is a sizzling roll call of brand-name auteurs, surprising inclusions and potential discoveries.
The sole Thai film to be selected is Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cemetery Of Splendour, his first film after winning the Palme d'Or in 2010 with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (it is showing on Monday, surprisingly not in main competition).
Also screening are new films by Todd Haynes (Carol, a lesbian drama starring Cate Blanchett), Gus Van Sant (Sea Of Trees, with Matthew McConaughey), Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, another eccentric work from the Greek director starring Rachel Weisz and Colin Farrell), Paolo Sorrentino (Youth, from the director of the Oscar-winning The Great Beauty), Hirokazu Kore-eda (Our Little Sister), Hou Hsiao-hsien (The Assassin), and Prisoners director Denis Villeneuve (a thriller called Sicario).
Cannes is always a deluge. To sort through this heady, overwhelming cine-jamboree, Life previews five things to keep an eye on at the festival, which runs until May 24. More reviews and reports will follow in Life and on the Bangkok Post's website in the next 10 days.
ASIAN FRONTRUNNERS
There are three Asian films in the main competition, all by prominent directors regarded as the best of their respective generations. Hou Hsiao-hsien, a leading figure in New Taiwan Cinema who has been absent from the festival for nearly 10 years, returns with martial arts film The Assassin, starring Shu Qi.
Jia Zhangke, a Chinese chronicler of his country's newfound wealth and ills, is in the race with Mountains May Depart. And Hirokazu Kore-eda, a Japanese filmmaker with a large Bangkok fan base, returns to the competition with Our Little Sister, a domestic drama adapted from a manga (his previous, Like Father Like Son, was a hit at the festival and in Thai cinemas two years ago). The last Asian talent to win the Palme d'Or was Thailand's Apichatpong. Before that, it was Shohei Immamura's The Eel, in 1997!
EUROPEAN FIREPOWER
The cannon is fully loaded, with five French films in competition, plus three Italian and one Greek — not to mention many more in the smaller sections. Among the most-antipiated are Jacques Audiard's thriller Dheepan, Maiwenn's Mon Roi and Nicloux Guillame's drama Valley Of Love, starring Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu. The trio of Italian films in the top flight represent what many believe to be a new golden age (which sounds like an exaggeration): Matteo Garrone's Tale Of Tales, starring Salma Hayek; Paolo Sorrentino's Youth, his first film after the triumph of The Great Beauty, this time in English and starring Michael Caine; and Nanni Moretti, a Cannes veteran, returning with My Mother.
THAI PRESENCE
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cemetery Of Splendour (or Rak Thi Khon Khaen) will show in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, a second-tier programme that sometimes yields more excitement than the high-profile competition. On Friday we previewed the film, which follows a middle-aged woman who tends to an soldier in a rural Thai hospital. But there's another Thai presence tucked up discreetly in another sidebar, the often-adventurous Directors' Fortnight programme. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom is a Thai cinematographer who has shot many films with Apichatpong. For this year's festival, he has shot a Portuguese film called Arabian Nights, a three-part epic of modern Portugal and its economic malaise, directed by Miguel Gomes.
The film (or films) was expected to show in competition, but its formidable length of over six hours probably discouraged its official selection.
CONTROVERSY?
There's no Lars von Trier this year, but there's something better: Gaspar Noe. The French director's new film, called Love, is already generating salacious reports and Twitter storms because of its poster, which shows wet tongues sticking out from moist lips, plus a dollop of semen on a nipple.
The director said his film would "give guys hard-on and makes girls cry". We're certainly looking forward to proving his claim. Love is showing as Midnight Screening selection.
MAVERICKS ON THE SIDE
Many other directors initially expected to be in the competition have instead been placed in sidebar showcases.
This includes Naomi Kawase, a veteran of Cannes, who's showing domestic drama An in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. Brillante Mendoza is a Filipino filmmaker who won Best Director here eight years ago. His new work, Taklub, about the Haiyan typhoon, is also showing in Un Certain Regard.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a Japanese master of the psychological thriller, is also in the section, with Journey To The Shore.
Shu Qi in a scene from The Assassin.
