The world returns to the Croisette

Jodie Foster speaks from the hearts of the premiere audience at the Festival Palais on Tuesday. “Haven’t you missed the glamor too? It feels good to come out, doesn’t it? ”She does so in fluent French, to the surprise of not just jury chairman Spike Lee. For Foster, who receives the Palm of Honor, Cannes is a special place. Here she made her first big appearance 45 years ago, when she was still a teenager, with the later palm winner “Taxi Driver”.

The 74th edition of the Cannes Film Festival is a reunion not only for Foster, who gave Pedro Almodóvar a short but very personal eulogy. After the one-year break, the world is returning to the Croisette, and the last palm tree winner, Bong Joon-ho, is also on the stage of the Grand Theâtre Lumière as an ambassador for cinema; French, Spanish, English and Korean are spoken. Despite the evening wear, the opening gala has an almost informal character. This apparently also applies to the Corona protocol.

In French cinemas it is mandatory to wear a mask, but in Cannes you can see it easily. In the afternoon, Spike Lee is the only one without a mask at the jury press conference between the Austrian director Jessica Hausner and the French actress Mélanie Laurent. Marion Cotillard has already put on the mask on the red carpet, but then decides against it. The team from the opening film “Annette” enters the hall without a mask. Did you miss the glamor? For sure. But not that much.

Adam Driver again in the opening film

The fact that the artistic director Thierry Frémaux opens “the first festival of a new era”, as the press conference calls it, with a film that has no favors on offer is the promising start to a full program over the next eleven days. Leos Carax’s two and a half hour musical “Annette” with the operatic power pop by the American band The Sparks takes part of the premiere audience out into the fresh air early.

Admittedly, the French author has a special taste, his last film on the Croisette, “Holy Motors”, featured a Kylie Minogue strolling through an empty department store and talking cars. “Annette” is completely tailored to its stars Adam Driver – for the third time in a row in Cannes, for the second time in the opening film – and Marion Cotillard, who play a celebrity couple. The film, however, is titled after the baby of the two, who is represented by a wooden doll.

Above all, however, Carax fulfills a requirement that the French director Mati Diop also speaks of in her role as a jury member: Films always have to reflect their time, but one should not view cinema solely through the prism of political and social upheavals. The cinema can only maintain its uniqueness if the audience remains open to new experiences.

The gossip press as a Greek choir

This undoubtedly applies to Carax, anything but a theme filmmaker. And even if “Annette” touches on current topics such as MeToo, celebrity cult and gender images, it is still the work of a filmmaker who lives entirely in his own imagination. With the Sparks brothers Ron and Russell Mael, who not only wrote the music but also the script, he has found two congenial partners.

Adam Driver plays the controversial stand-up comedian Henry McHenry, whose trademark apparently includes appearing in a bathrobe; Marion Cotillard the opera star Ann, who dies the most beautiful deaths on stage. When the two get together in public – he picks them up on a motorcycle from a premiere – the gossip press is upside down. A fictional boulevard show acts as the Greek choir for the dream couple of the hour, fueled by the birth of their first child with ears and wooden joints.

It becomes apparent early on that Henry’s true character will shine through at some point. “How was your performance?” She asks him at the beginning. “I killed her,” he replies. “Massacred.” – “Good boy!”, She replies. The beautiful muse, born to die, is sacrificed to a vitalistic masculinity. Carax has told similar stories before, but he has never had a star like Adam Drivers available for it.

Birth scene with oral sex

Driver embodies a new type of man in American cinema; in a bathrobe he always looks a bit awkward despite his six-pack. Doubts about his own irresistibility are already inscribed in his physique. “Annette” is on the one hand a very virile drama of suffering, but similar to Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story”, Driver works subtly against the dark features of his character.

Without him the film would hardly work, the audience is willing to forgive him for any mess. The presenter of the opening gala provides the pretext to the film, as it were, when she briefly flirted with Adam Driver in the audience and then said apologetically after touching the button in her ear: “Oh, I hear he’s married!”

The verve with which Carax throws himself into history is thrilling. Nobody would call Driver a gifted singer, he rather recites rhythmically; During her Oscar performance as Edith Piaf, Cotillard was content to move her lips in silence. But a musical with a sung montage of a birth scene and oral sex is a novelty even for the spoiled Cannes gala audience. Back on the Croisette, you find yourself in the middle of the penalty shoot-out between Italy and Spain, shortly before midnight, Italian flags fly through the streets. The world is back in Cannes.