He always came back empty-handed from the Croisette although he raised the temperature each time on the Cannes red carpet, bringing in his wake an aeropage of big Hollywood sizes. For the third time in his career, dreamlike director Wes Anderson is in the running for the Palme d'Or. The author of The Grand Budapest Hotel and Aboard the Darjeeling Limited presents Asteroid City in competition on Tuesday.
As in The French Dispatch, which saw Timothée Chalamet, Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson and Lyna Khoudri scare photographers and autograph hunters, Asteroid City, which was shot in Spain, brings together a glamorous cast: the faithful of filmmaker Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody and Jeff Goldblum, and newcomers like Margot Robbie, Tom Hanks, Maya Hawke and Scarlett Johansson...
Back in competition two years after The French Dispatch, which took place in a postcard France, the 54-year-old Texan, known for his old-fashioned and ironic style, this time sets his action in the America of the Fifties. In a small fictional desert town, famous for its gigantic meteorite crater and nearby astronomical observatory, soldiers and astronomers welcome for a weekend five gifted children, distinguished for their scientific creations, so that they present their inventions under the gaze of their parents.
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A few kilometers away, beyond the hills, loom mushrooms atoms caused by nuclear tests. These will not be the only unexpected events that will punctuate this retro and pastel tale, which will be released in French cinemas on June 26. Aliens could invite themselves to the party.
Wes Anderson offers an instantly recognizable cinema, with a retro visual palette and a taste for symmetry, often imitated, that delight his fans on Instagram. It remains to be seen if it will succeed in renewing itself and seducing the jury chaired by Ruben Östlund, who has already seen more than half of the 21 works in the running.
Italy back in force
Wes Anderson may be eclipsed by the maestro of transalpine cinema. Distinguished in 2021 with an honorary Palme d'Or, Marco Bellocchio, 83, unveils The Abduction. The true story of Edgardo Mortara, a 6-year-old Jewish child forcibly converted in the nineteenth century. The film is set in the Jewish quarter of Bologna where in 1858, the Pope's soldiers burst into the home of the Mortara family to take their 7-year-old son, Edgardo, who was going to receive a Catholic education.
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Will the veteran finally know the consecration, while the transalpine cinema has not been crowned with a Palme d'Or for more than 20 years? The coveted trophy has always eluded him despite his eight selections from The Leap into the Void in 1980, to The Traitor in 2019, on a repentant of the mafia.
Italy will have two more chances to win the prize. On the one hand, with Nanni Moretti, crowned in 2001 for The Son's Room and who returns Wednesday with Towards a Radiant Future. On the other hand, with Alice Rohrwacher, another Cannes regular, who follows a young archaeologist mixed with a group of grave robbers in Italy in the 80s in The chimera screened Friday.
