The 77th Cannes Festival has managed to snag George Miller’s prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga as one of its early highlights on Wednesday night (French time), after which reviews of the film are bound to clog the internet.
Is it as good as Fury Road where Charlize Theron played Furiosa and now Anya Taylor-Joy takes the role? Does Chris Hemsworth make up for the lack of Tom Hardy? We’ll have to wait and see.
The other Australian entry The Surfer, starring Nicolas Cage, likewise screens away from the competition but should make a splash. A co-production with Ireland directed by Irishman Lorcan Finnegan and written by his fellow countryman, Thomas Martin, the film, shot in Western Australia, counts Robert Connolly among its producers. A psychological thriller, it follows a man who returns to Australia after many years in the US to buy his family home, but is humiliated in front of his teenage son when a group of surfers claim ownership of the secluded beach of his childhood. Conflict ensues. Julian McMahon co-stars.
Australian actors also appear in international productions. In Rumours, set at the annual G7 summit, Cate Blanchett plays one of seven leaders, the German chancellor, while Charles Dance is the US President and Denis Menochet is the French President. Jacob Elordi features in Paul Schrader’s Oh Canada, playing the younger version of Richard Gere’s deserter who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam.
The festival opens on Tuesday with Quentin Dupieux’s The Second Act. As usual, the idiosyncratic French filmmaker has stars on board and the trailer shows Louis Garrel, Vincent Lindon, Lea Seydoux and his regular actor Raphael Quenard arguing that they are the film’s star.
The US writers’ and actors’ strikes have probably changed the look of the Cannes programme this year and there are certainly a large number of films from France. A new big budget version of The Count of Monte Cristo [main image of this article] starring Pierre Niney will premiere, as will Gilles Lellouche’s Beating Hearts, said to be the most anticipated French film of the year. The latter stars Adele Exarchopoulos and Francois Civil aka D’Artagnan from The Three Musketeers.
Arthouse master Jacques Audiard will present Emilia Perez, a French-US-Mexican musical comedy starring Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldana shot in Spanish; and Christophe Honore’s French-Italian Marcello Mio starring Catherine Deneuve and her daughter Chiara Mastroianni should be a hoot as they play up their relationships with the late great Marcello Mastroianni.
Two great statesmen of American cinema, Kevin Costner and Francis Ford Coppola, have self-funded mammoth productions. Costner, riding high on the success of Taylor Sheridan’s series Yellowstone, has directed two westerns, the first of which, Horizon: An American Saga will play in Cannes. If the Horizon films are a success, Costner plans to make two more. Interestingly, Chris Hemsworth pitched him to play the lead, but Costner decided he was young enough to play it himself. Australia’s Sam Worthington has a role in the first two chapters.
Coppola’s Megalopolis was always going to be a huge risk. The 85-year-old director used US$120 million of his own money (by selling part of his vineyard) and managed to snag Adam Driver as the lead, while relatives like his sister Talia Shire (Connie Corleone in the Godfather films) and her son, Jason Schwartzman, are part of the cast. Nicolas Cage’s The Surfer is programmed around the same time, so look out for him too at his uncle’s premiere.
Yorgos Lanthimos comes hot off the success of Poor Things to premiere Kinds of Kindness. An Irish/UK/US production, it re-teams the director with Emma Stone and is a triptych which he describes as “a contemporary film” with “four or five actors who play one part in each story, so they all play three different parts”. Can Lanthimos do it again and take away a prize?
Irish Saltburn star Barry Keoghan appears with German actor Franz Rogowski in Andrea Arnold’s Bird, the story of two kids being raised in a Kent squat, and Berlin best actor winner Sebastian Stan plays Donald Trump in the bound-to-be controversial The Apprentice. Renate Reinsve [left], the breakout star of The Worst Person in The World is outstanding in Armand, by some reports. There is a lot to look forward to.
The competition jury [below], with Barbie’s Greta Gerwig as the head, includes Eva Green (also in The Three Musketeers) Lily Gladstone, Nadine Labaki, Pierfrancesco Favino and Omar Sy.
[clockwise from top left]: Omar Sy, Lily Gladstone, J. A. Bayona, Ebru Ceylan, Pierfrancesco Favino, Eva Green, Kore-eda Hirokazu, Nadine Labaki, with Greta Gerwig, centre
