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Slow Burn: Dispatch from Cannes
All of a Sudden The wearied refrain—Cannes 2026 was a ho-hum edition, no masterpieces to see here, take the earlier flight home—obscured the quiet revolution taking place in film after film. This was a year of stories that build: All of a Sudden, The Dreamed Adventure, and La Gradiva are accumulative works, beautifully wrought and devastating in different ways, but not in the white-knuckle, nerve-racking manner of last year’s Sirat or It Was Just an Accident. Again and again, I had the sense of these movies having a bodily impact on me—not a wham-bam blow, but a more incremental emotional effect, as if the filmmakers were instilling a sense of dramatic muscle memory within me as I watched. That’s how All of a Sudden, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest, could feel so stirring in making an adventure of reflection and connection out of the extended heart-to-heart between a Japanese playwright, Mari, and a French eldercare manager, Marie-Lou. The pair meet as strangers but nurture a fortifying friendship that grows organically and encompasses their concerns for each other and about the world’s decline.
All of a Sudden lost out on the festival’s top prize to another multilingual drama, Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, whose supersized case-study-gone-wrong exposé of Norwegian child protective services felt like a stacked deck—more or less the opposite of Hamaguchi’s study of care in both execution and story. Whatever the curiosity value of Mungiu’s conviction that a Scandinavian nanny state is the globe’s actual clear and present danger, it seemed excessive to bestow a second Palme d’Or on his button-pushing tale, which shares an absolute faith in young ride-or-die bonds with 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, his 2007 Palme, but otherwise smacks of an encroaching reactionary outlook. If Hamaguchi’s ever-burgeoning talents went unrecognized, Marie-Lou and Mari’s relationship at least garnered a joint Best Actress award for Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto. Their bond thrums with the thrill of fast friendship and, for some of us, evokes a daily reality of hopeful-desperate dialoguing in which the distance between “how are you” and global endgame analysis has vanished. With apologies to pundits sniffing at this year’s muted star power, the Lumière Theater appearance to watch on the red carpet stream was Maho Isono, a Japanese anthropologist who attended the premiere. Her correspondence with philosopher Makiko Miyano, who fell terminally ill as Mari does, helped inspire Hamaguchi’s compassionate scenario of a connection sparked by chance that becomes a lifeline.
One week after All of a Sudden screened, another gradualist canvas emerged in Valeska Grisebach’s confidently realized The Dreamed Adventure. No points to Cannes schedulers for placing this three-hour-plus triumph on the last afternoon of premieres, but US distribution was quickly announced for Grisebach’s Eastern European borderland saga of a middle-aged archaeologist, Veska, with little patience for strained post-Soviet gangsterism. Though it opens on a rugged-looking man on an unclear mission (Syuleyman Letifov, from Grisebach’s Western), the film’s layers of alfresco table talk and village intrigue soon settle with Veska (rock-steady nonprofessional Yana Radeva), who keeps an eye on her circle of friends and helpers, including a curious teenage girl. Veska is choosing her moment to react to the tiresome status quo of chest-bumping, gun-toting men chasing the glory days of the 1990s mafias, and you might say the same of Grisebach, whose years-long prep involved lived-in research on the area. Director and character deliver in spades, as the film simultaneously evokes and denies the western genre, but, as Grisebach told an industry paper with a clarity and maturity of vision reflected in the film’s bluff treatment of backward gender relations and power dynamics: “It was more interesting to address ideas about who is strong and who’s weak… Who is, to speak frankly, fucking, and who is being fucked?”
If both All of a Sudden and The Dreamed Adventure channel how it feels to navigate the present moment, so did a couple of period dramas set around World War II with distinct ways of dropping us into the past. Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland is an impeccably shot and constructed road movie, where the road-trippers are Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter, Erika Mann (Sandra Hüller), embarking on the writer’s 1949 speaking tour across West and East Germany. Pawlikowski, never a long-hauler, might as well be showing off in rapidly distilling a moment in postwar thought with a fleet touch and elegant cast. Mann’s eloquent speeches resound with the monumental 19th-century first principles of Kant and Goethe, but can’t entirely meet the moment of postwar ruins, blinkered opportunism, and resurgent authoritarian demons. You wonder whether you’re looking into our own future a few years from now. Emmanuel Marre’s A Man of His Time, meanwhile, holds up another mirror to the present by tracking the rise and moral rot of a middling municipal bureaucrat (a maddeningly good Swann Arlaud) in Nazi-occupied Vichy France. The mimicry of hard-lit 16mm lends a you-are-there feel to the Frenchman’s paper-pushing shuffle toward fascism and genocide, with the Arlaud character based on Marre’s own great-grandfather (whose letters to his wife are quoted).
Possibly the best-reviewed find at Cannes received a prize in the Critics’ Week section: La Gradiva, the gorgeously observed debut feature from Marine Atlan, who also co-wrote the screenplay and was co-cinematographer. Filming on location in Naples, Atlan turns a wondrously attuned eye to a group of French students on a school trip to Pompeii, with a whisker-sensitive feel for adolescent angst and joy as well as the credible dedication of their teacher (Antonia Buresi). It’s hard to single out one actor in the well-cast bunch of newcomers (including Suzanne Gerin as a budding artist who has resigned herself to loneliness, and Colas Quignard as a somewhat inept tragic outsider), but the film is electric for its ability to draw you into the characters’ teenage crises, never diminishing them or pulling the rug out from under them with winking humor. Atlan’s camera framing also gets at something about teenage dynamics and autonomy as it switches up who’s an observer and who’s a participant at varying points. La Gradiva heads out of Cannes with US distribution though 1-2 Special and already a lengthy New Yorker rave—a welcome riposte to the Competition-centered Cannes hierarchy of attention.
The Camera d’Or for best debut feature went to another first effort, Clarissa, a sumptuously mounted reworking of Mrs. Dalloway from Nigerian directors Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri, with a sharpened colonialist critique referencing Chinua Achebe. It was one of an armful of titles that came into the festival with distribution from NEON, a bewildering array ranging from the turbocharged South Korean monster movie Hope (which featured a galloping, stretchy hominid alien seemingly based on Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son), to James Gray’s Queens family tragedy Paper Tiger, a pitch-perfect classical work that did not receive its due at the festival. Over in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, proceedings opened in grand style with a febrile meta-horror journey of self-realization and pleasure, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s latest and most readily digestible parasocial exploration of desire featuring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Armstrong. But the section’s top prize went to Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, a shattering study in divergent, even mysterious pathways through grief and recovery, shot by Gregory Oke (Aftersun) with a heady intimacy (both up close and from far away) that is enhanced by the immediacy of its sound design.
Everytime paired nicely with a Fortnight title, Dominga Sotomayor’s La Perra, a magnificently composed portrait of a Chilean islander (an arresting Manuela Oyarzún) whose tangle of childhood loss seems to essentially manifest in an ornery stray dog. Which brings me to probably the most haunting experience at Cannes: the unclassifiable and somewhat maligned The Unknown, directed by Arthur Harari. In a deeply vulnerable performance, Léa Seydoux plays a man who has been transferred into the body of a woman with whom he had sex at a carnivalesque warehouse party.
Critics routinely framed the film as a body-swap movie, which sets up the wrong genre expectations, ones that Harari sidesteps to craft the sort of uncompromising, go-it-alone film you go to Cannes to see. His disquieting, ambiguous film employs bodily displacement as a floating signifier, representing trauma in all its bewilderment and estrangement from self, as well as exploring the sometimes queasy solidarity felt with others in this state. (Seydoux took on similar themes in a more conventional drama elsewhere in the Competition: in Gentle Monster, Marie Kreutzer’s crushing if imperfect follow-up to Corsage [2022], she stars as a singer blindsided by the arrest of her husband on child pornography charges.)
If Cannes 2026 didn’t end with communion on the level of last year’s Palme d’Or, It Was Just an Accident (whose director, Jafar Panahi, has since been resentenced again by Iran), this year’s edition did conclude with an antiauthoritarian gesture. Russian exile Andrei Zvyagintsev, the Grand Prix winner for Minotaur, addressed the extremely offline Vladimir Putin, urging him to end the Ukraine war (referring, in an under-translated bit, to the dictator as not connecting with a VPN but having people who could bring him up to speed). Zvyagintsev’s first film in nearly a decade was filmed in Latvia, the better to portray a domineering businessman who turns outright murderer, though this adaptation of Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife to the Russian corruption industrial complex felt a little like a foregone conclusion. I confess I preferred Radu Jude’s guest-worker update (and punking) of another French work, Octave Mirbeau’s Diary of a Chambermaid, a less raucous companion piece to Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023) that follows a young mother’s double binds in nannying a stranger’s child while only able to FaceTime her own daughter back in their Romanian village. It joined a number of films that used performance in disarming ways, like Ira Sachs’s The Man I Love, which recenters its 1980s-set, AIDS-inflected story on a musical performer’s loss of memory and identity rather than corporeal decay. And maybe here my urge to fit in just one more film reflects a reluctance to declare Cannes 2026 a meh year, when I know there are so many titles I will compulsively return to long after the Lumière curtains closed.
