It’s the end of the world and Cannes Film Festival does not feel fine

CANNES, France (AP):

“Is this what the end of the world feels like?” So asks a character in one of the most-talked about films of the 78th Cannes Film Festival: Oliver Laxe’s Sirât, a Moroccan desert road trip through a World War III purgatory.

It’s well into Sirât, a kind of combination of Mad Max and The Wages of Fear, that that reality begins to sink in. Our main characters – Luis (Sergi López) and his son Esteban (Brúno Nuñez) – have come to a desert rave in search of Luis’ missing daughter. When the authorities break it up, they join up with a bohemian troupe of ravers who offroad toward a new, faraway destination.

Thumping, propulsive beats abound in Sirât, not unlike they do at Cannes’ nightly parties. In this movie that jarringly confronts the notion of escape from harsh reality, there are wild tragedies and violent plot turns. Its characters steer into a nightmare that looks an awful lot like today’s front pages.

“We wanted to be deeply connected to this day and age,” Laxe said in Cannes.

As much as Cannes basks in the Côte d’Azur sunshine, storm clouds have been all over its movie screens at the festival, which on Monday passed the halfway point. Portents of geopolitical doom are everywhere in a lineup that’s felt unusually in sync with the moment. Tom Cruise, in Mission: Impossible – Final Awakening, has battled the AI apocalypse. Raoul Peck, in Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5, has summoned the author’s totalitarianism warnings for today. Even the new Wes Anderson ( The Phoenician Scheme) is about an oligarch.

If the French Riviera has often served as a spectacular retreat from the real world, this year’s Cannes abounds with movies urgently reckoning with it. It’s probably appropriate, then, that many of those films have been particularly divisive.

Ari Aster’s Eddington was dismissed more than it was praised.

A NEW LOGIC

It’s been striking how much this year’s Cannes has been defined by anxious visions of the future. There have been exceptions – most notably Richard Linklater’s charming ode to the French New Wave Nouvelle Vague and Anderson’s delightful T he Phoenician Scheme.

But seldom has this year’s festival not felt like an ominous big-screen reflection of today.

The festival got under way with the new threat of US tariffs on foreign-produced films on the minds of many. Rising geopolitical frictions led even the typically optimistic Bono, who is in Cannes to première his Apple TV+ documentary Bono: Stories of Surrender, to confess that he had never lived at a time where World War III felt closer at hand.

Other films in Cannes weren’t as overtly about here and now as Eddington, but many have been consumed with the recurring traumas of the past. Two of the most lauded films – Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling and Two Prosecutors, by Sergei Loznitsa – contemplated intimate cases of history repeating itself.

In addition to geopolitical tremors quaking the movie screens, climate change and natural disasters are also on the minds of filmmakers.

“Times are tough but they’re very stimulating at the same time. We’ll have to look deeply into ourselves. That’s what we’re forced to do because it’s a tough world now,” said Sirât director Laxe.