Festival kicks off without Hollywood and Italia with a French opening

Under the dreamy, melancholic image of Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis in Thelma & Louise, the 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival began yesterday, with the gala dresses whipped by a mischievous wind on the tapis rouge unrolled in an ad hoc ceremony in the early afternoon. The French are masters of stardom and no one is their equal: they celebrate each and every ritual, they create uphill routes to the halls and interviews, they protect and ward off the stars so that the stardom is even more absolute. Ordinary people respond with eccentricity by walking around disguised as old film glories, such as Marilyn or Chaplin, and walking robot dogs followed by curious flesh-and-blood humanoids surrounded by photographers. There is something festive and lively about it, but there are also some serious thoughts to be made about cinema.

First of all, the festival decided to open with a French film,as it has been doing for years now, Vénus électrique by Pierre Salvadori, giving maximum light to its own cinema. Right and sacrosanct, but it has begun to lose Hollywood and the blockbusters that, perhaps out of competition, made a lot of stardust. Thus, that poster recalling how 35 years ago Ridley Scott chose the Croisette to present his road movie, which became a cult, seems almost grotesque.

Steven Spielberg, who launched ET The Extraterrestrial here in 1982, chose to go straight to theatres in June with Disclosure Day, skipping the French festival altogether. It seems that the excellent relations of Alberto Barbera, artistic director of the Venice Film Festival, with the Academy and L.A., will result in many films landing on the Lido in September, which has always been a launch pad for Oscar-winning films.

France's problem is also a relationship of distrust and prejudice with films produced and distributed by Netflix and Amazon, which therefore desert the Croisette. Contrary to what Venice rightly does: the times of cinema have changed, not taking platforms into consideration is anachronistic. Then, however, a strong space must be given to the independents.

Apart from Hollywood, it is also a desert for the Italians, if not for Francesco Zippel in Cannes Classic with Vittorio De Sica - Staging life. This talented director, who reconstructs the lives of film greats, had already presented Oscar Micheaux - The Superhero of Black Filmmaking in Cannes in 2021 and had investigated the existences of Sergio Leone, Fellini and Volonté, among others. With great perseverance he searches for stars who have known or may have drawn light for their art from the master he chooses and this time, for De Sica, he interviewed Isabella Rossellini, Ruben Östlund, Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne, Andrej Zvjagincev, Wes Anderson, Francis Ford Coppola, Asghar Farhadi. It will be screened on 16 May, which is a good date, as the first weekend of the festival is the most desirable one for the screening.