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Tom Cruise (centre) with festival director Thierry Frémaux (right) marvels at the fighter jets flying over Cannes for the premiere of his film »Top Gun Maverick«
Photo: Petros Giannakouris/AP
In »Top Gun Maverick«, Tom Cruise as super pilot Pete »Maverick« Mitchell gives his students (and his one student) the tip: don't think about it, just do it.
Whether the students follow him can be seen from May 26th when the blockbuster sequel starts in German cinemas.
Read the film's review here.
Festival director Thierry Frémaux has definitely taken the tip to heart.
He had French fighter jets fly over the Palais des Festivals, their vapor trails leaving the colors of the French and American flags, and unannounced Tom Cruise an honorary palm tree.
What was brought up for the European premiere of »Maverick« in Cannes was, in one word: grotesque.
As if the future of cinema depended on a single film and a single man, the festival courted Tom Cruise and his action film.
An almost 15-minute montage from his wide-ranging filmography should set the mood for the superstar, although Cannes has not shown a film by him for 30 years.
Looking back, Cruise's star suddenly seems to shine a lot brighter and looking ahead too: after "Maverick", wrote the respected criticism portal "Indiewire", even his biggest critics would have to admit that Cruise would be missing when he was no longer alive.
fight without opponent
Of course, it's far too early for an obituary for Cruise, and US action cinema also seems to be showing itself to be extremely vital with »Maverick«.
A more perfect amalgam of images of military
hard power
and pop culture
soft power
at least it hasn't existed for a long time.
Actually, the film is proof that the United States lost the battle for global supremacy long ago.
The first set photos showed that the Taiwanese flag had been removed from Cruise's legendary leather jacket in the original. In the film itself, »the opponent« is no longer assigned to any nation, is just an unnamed rogue state with a nuclear program.
Hollywood can no longer afford to tangle with China, which is why compromises in the script and production are piling up.
Fear reigns in Hollywood, and even Tom Cruise's star power can't blast it away.
So it's painfully fitting that Cannes has a new sponsor this year with the Chinese video platform TikTok.
Taking a stand against Russia and the war against Ukraine is relatively easy, and even on the Côte d'Azur there is a loud silence about China.
The most important message
The films shown so far do not yet suggest any other conversation than about politics.
The Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov, who attended a premiere for the first time in four years because he had previously been placed under house arrest in Moscow, said after the performance of »Zhena chaikovskogo« (»Tchaikovsky's Wife«): The most important message these days is a No to the war in Ukraine.
His film remains pale under the impression of his appearance, the first public one since fleeing to Germany, even though the leading actress Alyona Michailova, as the homosexual composer's ousted wife, offers a
tour de force
of rebellion against her unrequited love.
It gets quieter with »Armageddon Time« by James Gray, the only US director in this year's competition.
After his space drama »Ad Astra«, the title raises space blockbuster expectations, while borrowing it from a song by The Clash, which in turn is a cover by Jamaican reggae musician Willie Williams.
Whites assimilating black culture: With a little goodwill, this can be seen as one of the themes Gray weaves into his autobiographical narrative.
In Brooklyn in the early 1980s, white Jewish pre-teen Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) starts hanging out and fooling around with older black Johnny (Jaylinn Webb).
The fact that her school and later the police treat Johnny differently than Paul becomes apparent quickly and with a clarity that causes the film to flatten out dramatically.
Only once does the film go home to Johnny and his impoverished grandmother, preferring to stay with Paul's middle-class family and follow his struggle to pursue a career as an artist.
Walking the fine line between star and auteur cinema
In 2003, writer Jonathan Lethem used very similar, also autobiographical elements to create his outstanding novel »The Fortress of Solitude«.
Gray's pictures lag behind Lethem's rich motifs and narrative density, they illustrate more contemporary ideas about 80's New York than they tell from within.
Thick performances by Oscar winners Anthony Hopkins as Paul's grandfather and Anne Hathaway as Paul's mother also work against the intimacy of the material: With "Armaggedon Time" Gray simply does not find a firm footing on the line between star and auteur cinema.
How much finer is the French-language debut by the Italian Pietro Marcello.
After his big hit »Martin Eden«, in »L'envol« (opening film in the »Quinzaine des réalisateurs« series) he tells a much more reserved story about a single father and his little daughter Juliette, who after the end of the First World War moved to a village in the Normandy have to find their way.
Marcello's loose adaptation of a novel by the Russian fantasticalist Alexander Grin spans around 20 years of Juliette's life.
Along with the technical and political changes of those years, her growing up flows into the film's gentle narrative flow, which never loses its poetry and lightness despite this thematic abundance.
Even music interludes fit in seamlessly.
While fighter jets thunder over the festival palace,