Celebrity parade on the Cannes red carpet: The screening of Wes Anderson’s Palme d’Or in the running for “Asteroid City” on Tuesday was preceded by a star-studded stair climb to match the stunning cast.
Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Adrien Brody, Matt Dillon… Twenty actors and actresses, loyal or newcomers to the American filmmaker, made the lightning crackle in front of the Palais des Festivals after arriving together by bus to the applause of a large crowd .
Still missing are Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum and Margot Robbie, who will lend their facial features to the Barbie doll this summer alongside Ryan “Ken” Gosling.
Competing again, two years after “The French Dispatch” took place in a postcard from France, the Texan sets his action this time in a fictional American town in the middle of the desert, bringing parents and students together for science competitions.
“I look at Cannes in comparison to the other films I know that have been shown there and I feel lucky to be selected in the same place as them. It’s a chance for me to be a part of this cinematic history,” he confided to the New York Times in mid-May.
Known for his tongue-in-cheek and vintage style, Wes Anderson first landed in Cannes in 2012 with Moonrise Kingdom, offering instantly recognizable cinema with a retro visual palette and a penchant for symmetry that’s often emulated on Instagram.
It remains to be seen whether he manages to convince the jury chaired by Ruben Östlund, who is responsible for deciding between the 21 works in the Palme d’Or race.
Another filmmaker is in the running on Tuesday evening: the Italian Marco Bellocchio, 83, a regular in Cannes and awarded the Palm of Honor in 2021.
The author of films that denounce religion or the army, The Kidnapping deals with the true story of Edgardo Mortara, a forcibly converted Jewish child. The film is set in the Jewish quarter of Bologna, where in 1858 the Pope’s soldiers broke into the Mortara family home to take their seven-year-old son and give him a Catholic education.
Will Bellocchio finally receive the consecration while Italian cinema has not been crowned for more than 20 years?
The coveted trophy has always eluded him despite his eight selections from “Leap Into Nothing” in 1980 to “The Traitor” in 2019, when he remorsefully turned away from the Mafia.
Italy has two more chances to win the Palm, with Nanni Moretti, who was crowned for 2001’s The Son’s Room and returns on Wednesday with Towards a Radiant Future, and Alice Rohrwacher, another Cannes regular who’s starring in a young Archaeologists mixed follows met Friday in the “La chimère” competition with a group of grave robbers in 1980s Italy.
Four days after the chart, Finnish Aki Kaurismaki’s “The Dead Leaves” topped the group of critics compiled by the review Screen, which is a reference.
On the fringes of the festival, the gas and electricity cuts demanded by the CGT union, which was mobilized against pension reforms, particularly affected restaurants on the beaches, where lunch service was suspended. However, there were no power outages on the festival site.
Three men, employees of GRDF and Enedis distributors, were arrested “in flagrante delicto”, a police source told AFP. According to prosecutors, they have to complete a level of citizenship.