“Top Gun: Maverick,” “Tchaikovsky’s Wife” and other movies each get polemical in their own way. But there are scenes of lyrical beauty, as in “Scarlet.”
On Wednesday, the 75th Cannes Film Festival rolled out the red carpet for Tom Cruise while French fighter jets roared overhead streaming smoke trails of red, white and blue. Once again, the festival and Hollywood had joined forces to declare their shared values — liberté, égalité, fraternité, publicité! — while delivering a militaristic spectacle that instantly became worldwide news. The message was deafening and strategically on point: After a few rough few years, Cruise was back in force and so too was Cannes. Cruise was at the festival for a special screening of “Top Gun: Maverick,” the sequel to his 1986 blockbuster breakthrough. While his appearance at the world’s most prestigious film festival may seem strange, it was in keeping with this event, where cinephilia runs deep. And while that love is sincere, Cannes has always banked on stars to generate public relations and keep capital flowing. Billy Wilder’s “The Lost Weekend” was in competition at the first festival in 1946 (it won), a few months after France and the United States signed an agreement opening France to American products, including films.
“Show me the money!” as Cruise said in “Jerry Maguire,” one of the movies featured in a video tribute to the star the night of his premiere. In 13-plus minutes, this highlight reel bounced around Cruise’s decades-long career. It also soon entered semiotically confusing territory when it cranked the triumphal opening of Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” which memorably plays in “2001: A Space Odyssey” when the ape-man realizes that a bone can become a weapon. Was Cruise the new man or the star child? I wondered. Or was this a nod at Kubrick, who directed Cruise in “Eyes Wide Shut”? Whatever the case, Cruise took over Cannes on Wednesday, fielding questions at one event and lingering on the red carpet at his premiere, where he smiled at fans and signed autographs. By the time he entered the Grand Théâtre Lumière, the 2,300-seat theater in the festival’s headquarters, the screening was running late, and the audience — which watches the red-carpet entrances live on the large screen — was pumped. After the festival’s director, Thierry Frémaux, summoned the star onstage, Cruise thanked everyone and noted that he could see everyone’s faces (“no masks”), prompting loud laughter. I didn’t join in, not that anyone would know the difference given that I was wearing an N95 mask. This is the first Cannes that I’ve attended since 2019; it was canceled in 2020 and resumed in person the following year with assorted Covid-19 protocols. Recorded announcements before the screenings continue to encourage festivalgoers to mask up, but face coverings and regular negative tests are no longer required.
