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Cannes vs Venice: who is winning the film festival star wars?
The first thing to know about the rift between Cannes and Venice is that ultimately it’s Hitler’s fault. When Venice was founded in 1932, it was the first film festival anywhere in the world, but within a few years it had morphed into a fascist pageant, closely overseen by Benito Mussolini and his cronies in the Italian government.
Among the international filmmaking community, this perversion of purpose was a great cause for concern – and the last straw came in 1938, when the jury was leant on by none other than the German Führer himself, and were forced to split the top prize between the propagandistic Nazi epic Olympia and Luciano Serra, Pilot, an Italian pro-war drama.
So Cannes was established the following year as a detoxed alternative. The first edition was planned for September 1939, with a programme including The Wizard of Oz and Goodbye, Mr Chips, but the outbreak of war on the third of that month put paid to that. Yet Cannes returned in style in 1946, and ever since has been synonymous with cinema in all its glamour, delirium, pretension and grace.
That rather puts its current scraps over the Oscars, MeToo and Netflix into perspective – though it isn’t overstating things to say that each one presents its own existential threat. Hollywood no longer seems to want to premiere its brightest awards-season hopes there, while every year seems to throw up a new sexism scandal, from the programme’s long-standing gender imbalance – female directors are very much the exception – to the recent “Heelgate” spat over its dress code for female premiere attendees.
Meanwhile, as filmmakers turn to streaming platforms for creative freedom, Cannes’s high-profile falling-out with Netflix – as of last year, films have to be eligible for release in French cinemas to be allowed to compete – has left the festival looking treacherously out of step with the times.
Some have pointed at its decision to present Alain Delon with an honorary Palme d’Or this year as further evidence of this, given the 83-year-old French actor’s history of reactionary Right-wing politics. “We are not going to give Alain Delon the Nobel Peace Prize,” Cannes’s redoubtable artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, told reporters earlier this week. “Today it is very difficult to reward or honour or recompense anyone because the political police then falls on you.”
For Venice, this has presented a golden opportunity. The received wisdom is that Cannes has lost the initiative to its older cousin in recent years, a belief backed up by those supposedly all-important Oscar tallies. Since 2000, only two Best Picture victors have had their world premieres on the Croisette, No Country For Old Men and The Artist, versus Venice’s four – The Hurt Locker, Birdman, Spotlight and The Shape of Water, plus some notable near misses, including La La Land and Roma.
The cause of the imbalance comes down to Venice’s relative proximity to the Academy Awards compared to Cannes – late August/early September versus May, with the Oscars usually falling in February – and the former’s current willingness to play the part of Oscar season launchpad. Venice is an appealing proposition to American filmmakers who want the old-world romance of a European festival premiere, but without the crocodile-pit style of criticism that the more febrile Cannes atmosphere, with its vying strands and busier programme, tends to whip up.
A bad Cannes reception can become an albatross around a film’s neck that never flies off: witness the fates of the Nicole Kidman-starring Grace of Monaco and Sean Penn’s The Last Face, two recent American contenders to have been laughed out of town so heartily that both went straight to TV in the United States. Yet even hits at Cannes don’t necessarily have it made.
Bennett Miller’s ice-sculpted John DuPont biopic Foxcatcher and Todd Haynes’s masterful Patricia Highsmith adaptation Carol were both critically adored when they played here, in 2014 and 2015 respectively. But in each case, by the time the Oscars rolled around nine months later, Best Picture went to a newer, shinier – and arguably inferior – Venice-minted release.
Frémaux has framed this new caution from Hollywood as a boon for international directors. “I accept it’s the game and my friend Alberto Barbera” – Frémaux’s Venice counterpart – “is doing what he has to do, being an American platform,” he said at the unveiling of this year’s programme. “We want to keep on with world cinema… We have some mainstream films, and also some which are quite radical. That’s also why you are in Cannes, to discover what is new.”
Yet unlike Venice, which is essentially just premieres and Aperol spritz, Cannes is a fully fledged trade show, where deals are struck, rumours spread – and, yes, boundaries crossed. (Until last year, Harvey Weinstein was a regular presence.) Since it plays host to the entire industry, it is far more intertwined with the MeToo scandal than any other festival, Venice included.
Hence the additional scrutiny. Cannes’s 20 per cent female-directed competition strand this year has attracted much criticism, while Venice’s 4.7 per cent female-directed line-up in 2018 passed without a peep of protest. “People ask Cannes to do things they don’t ask other festivals to do,” Frémaux told reporters earlier this week. “The Cannes Film Festival is asked to be impeccable and perfect.”
As for the Netflix feud, it’s an accident of geography first and foremost. Unlike Italy, France has long-standing (and now outdated) laws that bar any film released in cinemas from being broadcast for three years – either on terrestrial television or a streaming service. And since Netflix has moved in on the mid-budget, medium-risk, director-driven terrain now largely abandoned by Hollywood, Cannes is missing out on the fruit of that – which this year includes new work by former Palme d’Or winners Martin Scorsese and Steven Soderbergh. As the business itself continues to shape-shift, there’s no question that Cannes has to work harder than its rivals to keep up. But this is the festival that beat the Nazis. It’ll be fine.