The Red Carpet at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, celebrated from 12th to 23rd May, overshadowed a French right-wing remake of the Red Scare that gripped Hollywood from the late 40s to 1960, curtailing or completely ending the careers of hundreds of artists. Back in the day of McCarthyism, approximately 325 artists were blacklisted for suspected communist activities. This number has been doubled by Canal+, which banned around 600 French film professionals, among them Sepideh Farsi, Adèle Haenel, Juliette Binoche, who was at Cannes with Asghar Farhadi’s competition entry Parallel Tales, director Arthur Harari, also in competition with the mystery drama The Unknown, Swann Arlaud, who plays the lead in Emmanuel Marre's biopic A Man of His Time, and Jean-Pascal Zadi.
They all ran afoul of French millionaire media mogul and Canal+ main shareholder Vincent Bolloré, whom they denounced in an open letter warning that throwing French cinema into right-wing hands would risk “a fascist takeover of the collective imagination.” In case someone thinks that’s overly dramatic, just look at Bolloré’s vita, which basically screams right-wing Super Villain. The nepo baby of an industrialist empire and protégé of the banker dynasty de Rothschild, he used his immense riches to gain control of a significant share of French news, markedly the aggressively right-wing CNews, and entertainment media. The longtime friend of Nicolas Sarkozy and fervent supporter of Marine Le Pen‘s neo-fascist party has used his power in the past to push an alt-right ideology within his media imperium.
Its influence at Cannes felt almost suffocating, with this year’s program featuring 50 films backed by Canal+, which won all in all 25 prizes. One of these prizes is the coveted Palme d’Or for Fjord, Cristian Mungiu’s manipulative mix of family and courtroom drama. The hardcore-reactionist narrative paints one of the most brutally repressive and intolerant groups in human history — white straight monogamous middle-class Evangelical Christians — as victims of intolerance. It’s a premise so ridiculously out of tune with reality it would be funny, if the rhetoric of the repressor’s alleged victimization wasn’t so dangerously effective. In a bitterly ironic twist, Canal+ chief executive Maxime Saada uses it to defend the banning of the open letter’s signatories, whining that their statement was an “injustice.”
Boos filling Cannes’ festival cinemas when the Canal+ logo appeared on screen seemed more a sign of an urge to get attention than actual political protest. After all, the festival reaffirmed its status as a stronghold of white patriarchal reactionism with a program dedicated to old male regulars, French cinema, bourgeois perspectives, and Eurocentric exclusivism. Only five of the 22 competition titles were by female directors, compared to 17 by male directors who already had had at least one film in competition. Works like Jane Schoenbrun’s splatter satire Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the first film by a trans director to open Un Certain Regard, or Clarissa, Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri’s Nigerian take on Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway”, were original exceptions in a year dominated by mediocrity.
Noticeably numerous shared prizes betrayed the indecisiveness of the jury led by Park Chan-wook. While there was enough insipidity and inaneness, nothing stood out, neither bad nor good, in this rather underwhelming year. Highly anticipated titles such as Kantemir Balagov’s Butterfly Jam or James Gray’s Paper Tiger turned out meh. Others such as Paweł Pawlikowski‘s Fatherland, winner of a—shared—best director award, or Grand Prix winner Minotaur by Andrey Zvyagintsev, were impressively crafted, but exhaustingly conventional. Even the star power remained muted with last-minute cancellations by Scarlett Johansson and Barbra Streisand, in contrast to the stars’ self-praise during the opening ceremony as reincarnations of cinema, art, freedom, humanism, democracy—though a few of these would probably be dropped if the Bolloré scandal fulfills its threat.
Artistic director Thierry Frémaux, who called the shortage of clear political statements at the awards ceremony “dignity and restraint”, doesn’t feel alarmed, though. Neither by Bolloré nor by Canal+, which has his “full support”. Not by the encroaching of streaming, series, and very much not immersive “immersive productions” upon cinema, which allegedly “rules supreme” at Cannes. And least of all by the political climate pointing to a neo-fascist victory in the upcoming French election. Whoever wins, the Cannes Film Festival has set the dates to celebrate its 80th anniversary: “We will be there!” If only the 600 blacklisted artists could say that with the same conviction.
All winners of the 79th Cannes Film Festival are listed here.