Cannes 2019

Cannes Classics, Jury, and Trailers

Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados (1950)

Cannes jury president Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu will be joined by directors Kelly Reichardt, Alice Rohrwacher, Yorgos Lanthimos, Robin Campillo, and Pawel Pawlikowski, actresses Elle Fanning and Maimouna N’Diaye, and graphic novelist and filmmaker Enki Bilal. Today’s announcement follows the unveiling of a tantalizing lineup of new restorations slated for the Cannes Classics program. The good news for cinephiles unable to fly to France next month is that, as with a good number of new restorations presented in Venice or at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, many of the nearly two dozen premiering in Cannes will eventually find their way to repertory theaters. Among the standouts this year are a fiftieth anniversary screening of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) introduced by Alfonso Cuarón, tributes to Lina Wertmüller and Miloš Forman, and three films by Luis Buñuel.

With L’age d’or (The Golden Age, 1930), Buñuel “established the thematic, formal, and especially structural templates he would follow for his nearly fifty years of filmmaking to come,” wrote Calum Marsh for the Village Voice in 2014. “A polemical, vignette-style feature with serious sexual and anti-religious overtones, L’age d’Or is, in many ways, the archetypal Buñuel picture—with transgressions his later work would frequently recapitulate.” Buñuel’s depiction of poverty and violence on the streets of a slum in Mexico City, Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned, 1950), “with its indelible dreams and frissons of beauty, earned him the prize for best director at Cannes,” noted Marsh, “and it remains among his most essential films.” In 2002, Slant film editor Ed Gonzalez wrote that, while Nazarín (1958), one of Andrei Tarkovsky’s favorite films of all time, “remains a subtle attack on religious naïveté, the director would never be as mindful of the possibilities of religious healing as he is here.”

Other notable works in the lineup include films by Vittorio De Sica, Jean Renoir, Andrzej Wajda, John Huston, and Jean Grémillon as well as Taiji Yabushita’s The White Snake Enchantress (1958), the first anime feature in color. Lina Wertmüller will be joined by frequent collaborator Giancarlo Giannini when she introduces Seven Beauties (1975). Along with Loves of a Blonde (1965), the program will present Forman vs. Forman, a documentary tracking the life of Miloš Forman. And there’ll be four more documentaries about cinema, Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound, which has just premiered at Tribeca; portraits of Anna Magnani and Johnny Hallyday; and the last interview with the late Bernardo Bertolucci.

Trailers

With two weeks to go before the festival opens, the first few trailers have been appearing online. We’ve seen the ones for Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Those of us curious about Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Young Ahmed will have to make do for the time being with a trailer in French with Dutch subtitles, but the wordless one for Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory doesn’t need subtitles at all.

So far, three works screening out of competition have trailers, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Amazon series Too Old to Die Young, Dexter Fletcher’s Elton John biopic Rocketman, and in French but without subtitles, Claude Lelouch’s The Best Years of a Life. The film reunites the eighty-one-year-old director with the stars of his 1966 hit A Man and a Woman, Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant. One of the most impressive trailers so far is for a film slated to premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight, Melina León’s Song Without a Name:

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