Cannes Film Festival Preview 2021 | Festivals & Awards

The festival launches on July 6, with “Annette,” by French cult director and perennial enfant terrible Leos Carax (“Holy Motors”), and starring Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver. It’s the first of the 24 international films selected to compete for the coveted Palme d’Or. Like a goodly number of films at Cannes this year, “Annette” already has U.S. distribution, and will open in theaters on August 6 through Amazon Studios.

Carax’s track record suggests “Annette” to be a work of singular eccentricity, a supposition backed up by the brief advance information available, as well as by a loony trailer. Featuring the music of the pop-art band Sparks, this operatic plot has Cotillard and Driver in singing roles as the parents of an unusually gifted child. If the brief “Intracte” accordion sequence in “Holy Motors,” and the spectacular excesses of “The Lovers on the Bridge” are any indication, Carax will take an odd and stirringly compelling approach to the musical genre, now experiencing a seeming popular revival with films like “In the Heights” and “West Side Story” later this year.

Characteristic of every Cannes competition, the selection is headlined by internationally-known heavy-hitters, past winners and star names, including Paul Verhoeven (“Benedetta”), Sean Penn (“Flag Day”), Jacques Audiard (“The Olympiads“), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (“Memoria”), Wes Anderson (“The French Dispatch”), Nanni Moretti (“Three Floors”), Francois Ozon (“Everything Went Well”), Bruno Dumont (“France”), and Asghar Farhadi (“A Hero”).

As ever, female directors are very much in the minority in the official competition, although somewhat better represented in the more freewheeling “Un Certain Regard” section. Three French female directors are in competition for the Palme: Mia Hansen-Love with “Bergman Island,” a fraught marriage drama fittingly filmed at Ingmar Bergman’s famed island retreat (to be released by IFC); Julia Ducournau with the horror tinged “Titane,” involving medical experiments; and Catherine Corsini with the hospital-set drama “The Divide” (to be released by Neon). They are joined by Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi with “The Story of My Wife,” loosely based on the legend of the Flying Dutchman. This grand total of four women matches 2019’s tellingly minimal all-time high number of female directors invited into the overwhelmingly male aristocracy of Palme contenders.

Dark horse winners have claimed the Palme with some regularity, but early speculation and hyped-up expectations will typically focus on new work by the big names, the powerhouse directors whose past exposure at Cannes and cumulative array of international awards mark them initially as the ones to watch. 

Of front-running interest is “Memoria” by Apichatpong (“call me Joe”) Weerasethakul, a formally adventurous director whose haunting “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” earned the Palme d’Or in 2010. According to Weerasethakul, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, central to “Memoria,” a co-production set in Colombia, is “having no roots.” The film stars indie favorite Tilda Swinton as a Scottish tourist who encounters portents of the supernatural; familiar territory for “Joe” no matter the location. In an amusing twist of fate, July 16 is the Thai director’s 51st birthday, the same day the sequestered Cannes jury will make their decisions. A second Palme d’Or would make quite a gift.