The Cannes Film Festival is quickly approaching and begins on Tuesday, May 15, next week. With that comes lots of first-look images, new trailers, new clips, and more promotional aspects of some of the most highly anticipated films of the year (see our Cannes 2024 preview here). Three clips from David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds” recently appeared on the Cannes Film Festival website, and more promotional elements are also surfacing. The first and most notable might be the trailer for Competition title “Marcello Mio” from director French director Christophe Honoré.
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A very meta-affair, the movie is an imaginary tale about the French actress Chiara Mastroianni. The very definition of film royalty, Mastroianni is the real-life daughter of famous cinema icons, the late Italian star Marcello Mastroianni and French superstar Catherine Deneuve. In the film, Chiara plays a version of herself grappling and contending with her father’s legacy to the point that she starts dressing, acting, and speaking like him. Deneuve also plays a version of herself in the film, as do actors like Fabrice Luchini, Benjamin Biolay, Nicole Garcia, and Melvil Poupaud. It’s quite the wild and fanciful-sounding affair.
Here’s the official “Marcello Mio” synopsis from Cannes:
This is the story of a woman named Chiara. She is an actress, the daughter of Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve. During a summer that sees her reality fall into disarray, Chiara decides to live as her father. She dresses like him. She speaks like him. She breathes like him. Chiara’s impersonation is so convincing that people around her begin to believe. They call her “Marcello.”
Here’s the official trailer:
Another competition title with a newly released trailer is “Grand Tour,” from Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes. Best known for poetic and surreal Cannes films like 2012’s breakthrough film “Tabu” and his “Arabian Nights” trilogy from 2015, Gomes’ latest is his first film to ever play in Competition on the Croisette.
While starring mostly unknown Portuguese actors (at least to North American audiences), “Grand Tour” essentially sounds like a surreal romantic travelogue about a cowardly civil servant with cold feet who runs away the day before he’s about to be married and the fiancée who won’t take no for an answer and tries to track him down to be betrothed, regardless.
Here’s the official synopsis:
Rangoon, Burma, 1917. Edward, a civil servant for the British Empire, runs away from his fiancée Molly the day she arrives to get married. During his travels, however, panic gives way to melancholy. Contemplating the emptiness of his existence, the cowardly Edward wonders what has become of Molly… Determined to get married and amused by Edward’s move, Molly follows his trail on this Asian grand tour.
Below is the trailer and two new clips from the movie.
Lastly, the first clip from “The Surfer” has arrived. Starring Nicolas Cage, the film is directed by Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan, known for “Vivarium” starring Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg, which premiered at Cannes in 2019, and 2022’s “Nocebo” featuring Eva Green. Playing as a Midnight Screening out of Competition, “The Surfer” co-stars Nic Cassim, Alexander Bertrand, Julian McMahon, Miranda Tapsell, Justin Rosniak, and more. The film centers on a surfer (Cage), trying to buy back his family home in Australia, who is brought to the edge of his sanity when he lands in conflict with local people who claim ownership of the beach land.
Here’s the official synopsis from Cannes:
A man returns to the idyllic beach of his childhood to surf with his son but is humiliated by a group of powerful locals and drawn into a conflict that rises with the punishing heat of the summer and pushes him right to his breaking point.
Cannes has released the film’s first clip; you can watch that below.