The Truman Show is a 1990s Hollywood movie about a man who lives in a bubble, cut off from the world. As played by Jim Carrey, Truman Burbank – surrounded by actors, his every move dogged by cameras – stares at a stage set and believes that it’s real. In the film’s final scene he climbs the stairs, finds a door and prepares to escape his gilded cage.
That keynote image – Truman’s ascent against a painted sky – is now the official poster for the forthcoming Cannes film festival, soon to be plastered on programmes, Blu-Tacked in shop windows and rigged like a godhead across the concrete Palais. And while we should be wary of judging an event by its cover, the choice of image feels apt. The organisers picked it, they say, because it “represents a poetic celebration of the quest for expression and freedom”. Others may read it as a self-owning comment on the festival as a whole.
That’s the perennial question about Cannes, that millionaire’s playground on the Côte d’Azur. Is it the bubble or the door, the sickness or the cure? A creative response to the woes of the world or a means of laundering its worst excesses? Nobody is certain. The jury’s always out. Cannes thrives on frictions, contradictions; that’s part of its appeal. But pull the elastic too hard and sooner or later it snaps.
This year marks the festival’s 75th edition, a birthday of sorts. It provides the perfect excuse to rewind through the event’s past, celebrating its history as a home for provocation, a seedbed for the Nouvelle Vague, New Hollywood, the buena onda of Latin American cinema. But it’s also a chance to reset the compass, to map out the future. Judged on face value, this year’s lineup is terrific. There are new films from David Cronenberg, Claire Denis, George Miller, Kelly…