The Debussy Cramp
Like all Cannes film festivals, the 71st began brightly for this correspondent with the highest of hopes and expectations—and by that of course I am referring to Paulo Branco’s lawsuit against the Festival de Cannes to block the closing-night screening of Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Say what you will about Cannes, but in my almost 20 years of attendance I’ve never seen the festival’s brutalist concrete façade show the slightest of tendencies to crack. Yet in the midst of the Branco-Quixote kerfuffle, a volley of press releases was issued that saw something like critical editorializing penetrating the typically machine-like vernacular. I mean, they referred to Branco “and his lawyer son” having “used intimidation and defamatory statements, as derisory as they are ridiculous” and “slanderous and grotesque statements” and a “campaign of attempted intimidation,” in case you didn’t get the point. I for one am all in favour of signs of life, a breakdown of the anonymous. Someone should try and sue Cannes every year, as it would make the festival a much more fun place.
But this sudden and rare manifestation of a human touch was no coincidence. After the well-publicized Netflix, selfie, and press-screening scheduling debacles—which truly led to a deflated sense of importance in the press (goal achieved), but also a completely deflated ambiance inside the non-gala official screenings I attended—it was necessary for Cannes to save some face, while at the same time overcompensating for the smallest of victories. In pure Trumpian fashion, —a to-do about a film that, unsurprisingly, turned out to be awful—allowed Cannes to deflect attention from its persistent problems, and also its ass’ most recent festering, corpulent boil: Harvey Weinstein. Because this was a year when extra-cinematic issues (#MeToo, 50/50) took precedence over the actual movies, a firestorm waiting to happen in an industry,
