It’s the end of the world and the 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, we come to learn, 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.

“Sirât” is laudable for its it's-time-to-break-stuff attitude to its characters, even if that makes for a sometimes punishing experience for the audience. This is a love-or-hate-it movie, sometimes at the same time.

Ari Aster's "Eddington," perhaps the largest American production in recent years to sincerely grapple with contemporary American politics, was dismissed more than it was praised. But for a good while, "Eddington" is breathtakingly accurate in its depiction of the United States circa 2020.

In “Eddington,” the conservative, untidy sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) runs for mayor against the liberal incumbent, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), partly over disagreements on mask mandates. But in Aster’s small-town satire, both left and right are mostly under the sway of a greater force: social media and a digital reality that can wreak havoc on daily lives.

“I wrote this film in a state of fear and anxiety about the world,” Aster said in Cannes. “I wanted to try and pull back and just describe and show what it feels like to live in a world where nobody can agree on what is real anymore.”

Reflecting a world running on a 'new logic’

It's been striking how much this year's Cannes has been defined by anxious, if not downright bleak 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 "The Phoenician Scheme." But seldom has this year's festival not felt like an ominous big-screen reflection of today.

That's been true in the overall chatter around the festival, which got underway with the new threat of U.S. tariffs on foreign-produced films on the minds of many filmmakers and producers. Rising geopolitical frictions led even the typically very optimistic Bono, in Cannes to premiere his Apple TV+ documentary "Bono: Stories of Surrender," to confess 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 of them have been consumed with the recurring traumas of the past. Two of the most lauded films from the beginning of the festival — Mascha Schilinski’s “Sound of Falling” and “Two Prosecutors,” by the Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa — contemplated intimate cases of history repeating itself.

“Two Prosecutors,” set in Stalin’s Russia, captures the slow-moving crawl of bureaucratic malevolence by adapting a story by the dissident author and physicist Georgy Demidov, who spent 14 years in the gulag. Loznitsa said his film is “not a reflection of the past. It’s a reflection of the present.”

In the period political thriller “The Secret Agent,” Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho turns to not a real historical tale but a fictional one, set in 1977 during Brazil’s military dictatorship.

Wagner Moura brings a natural movie-star cool to the role of Marcelo, a technology expert returning to his hometown of Recife where government corruption is rife and hitmen are on his tail. Vividly textured, with absurdist touches (the hairy leg of a corpse plays as a colorful metaphor for the dictatorship), “The Secret Agent” seeks, and sometimes finds, its own logic of political resistance.

“I really believe that some of the most heartfelt texts come not necessarily from fact but from the logic of what is happening,” Filho said in an interview. “Right, now the world seems to be running on some kind of new logic. Ten or 15 years ago, some of these ideas would be completely dismissed, even by the most conservative politicians. I think ‘The Secret Agent’ is a film full of mystery and intrigue but it does seem to have a certain logic which I associate with my country, Brazil.”

Finding the rays of hope

In nonfiction filmmaking, no one may be better today than Peck ("I Am Not Your Nego," last year's "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" ) in connecting historical dots. "Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5" marries George Orwell's words (narrated by Damian Lewis) on totalitarian states that demand "the disbelief of objective truth" with the actions of contemporary governments around the world, including Russia, Myanmar and the United States. Images of a bombed-out Mariupol in 2022 runs with its official description: "Peacekeeping operations."

It’s not just geopolitical tremors quaking on movie screens in Cannes. Climate change and natural disasters are on the minds of filmmakers, too, sometimes in the most unlikely of movies.

The French animated film “Arco,” by illustrator Ugo Bienvenu, is about a boy from the distant future who lives on a “Jetsons”-like platform in the clouds. He travels back in time to another future-time, 2075, where homes are bubbled to protect them from fire and storm, and robots do all of the parenting for working parents who appear to their children only as digital projections.

It’s a grim future, particularly so because it feels quite plausible. But the strange charm of “Arco,” a brightly colored movie with a whole lot of rainbows, is that is offers a younger generation a dream of a future they might make. A relationship between the boy from the future and a girl who finds him in 2075 sparks not just a friendship but a nourishing vision of what’s possible.

“Arco,” in that way, is a reminder that the most moving movies about our current doom offer a ray of hope, too.

“People are feeling disenchanted with the world, so we have to re-enchant them,” said Laxe, the “Sirât” director. “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.”

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Jake Coyle has covered the Cannes Film Festival since 2012. He's seeing approximately 40 films at this year's festival and reporting on what stands out.

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