The Palais des Festivals, the central hub of the Cannes Film Festival, a massive bulwark of filmmaker-named halls and pristine movie screens, is about as close…
The Palais des Festivals, the central hub of the Cannes Film Festival, a massive bulwark of filmmaker-named halls and pristine movie screens, is about as close as you can get to a cinema temple. To enter, you must ascend red-carpeted steps. But in the past 16 months, Cannes’ Palais hasn’t been home to the movie frenzy it hosts annually. Last year’s festival was postponed, then canceled. The Palais, instead, was lined with hospital beds in the early months of the pandemic. Earlier this year, it was turned into a mass-vaccination “Vaccinodrome.” On Tuesday, the Cannes Film Festival, delayed from May to July, will finally open its doors for its 74th and maybe most critical edition. Its famed red carpet will again flood with stars. The screens will be relit. And, maybe, the movies will rekindle some of the romance and grandeur that went dormant this past pandemic year. “It’s a kind of pilgrimage or Mecca, and even more so this year,” says Mark Cousins, the Scotland-based filmmaker whose “The Story of Film: a New Generation” will premiere opening day on the Cannes beach. In the Palais, Leos Carax, a director whose freewheeling fictions reflect real movie dreams, will debut his anticipated “Annette,” a musical with Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. The annual pressure of mounting Cannes, arguably the world’s most celebrated film festival and a global standard-bearer for the big screen, is always massive. The last Cannes, a good one, launched Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite,” the Cannes’ Palme d’Or winner before it took best picture at the Oscars. But this year, after much of the movie world went into hibernation, Cannes’ greatest duty may be jolting moviegoing awake. Announcing the lineup last month, Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux declared: “Cinema is not dead.” “When Thierry Frémaux called me after he had seen the film, he said: ‘We’ve been asleep and we want to wake up and pick up where we left off,’” says Cousins, who will also premiere a documentary on the British film producer (and Cannes regular) Jeremy Thomas.
