The Big Show that is the 2015 Cannes Film Festival is now officially bearing down on us, like the unstoppable juggernaut of quality international filmmaking, hype, backlash, Nespresso and overpriced sandwiches that it is.
As ever, Cannes is bigger than any one film or any one slot. That said, the Opening Film sets the tone for the event —it’s announced earlier than the rest of the program and always comes under possibly unenviable scrutiny from the world’s press, who for this one screening if no other, go in with eyes unbloodshot, minds sharp and pens primed.
This year, the selection of Emmanuelle Bercot‘s “Standing Tall” as the opener (announced earlier in the week) already raised some eyebrows, as it seems a pointed departure from the recent operating procedure of securing a glitzy Hollywood project to kick off the festival in a flurry of glamorous red carpet photos. With that strategy taking a nosedive last year with the terrible “Grace of Monaco,” we can certainly see why Cannes honchos changed up the usual playbook.
The long history of the Cannes Film Festival has provided its fair share of both terrific openers and outright duds. So here’s our Official Selection of the 10 Best and 5 Worst Cannes Openers ever —to see how Bercot’s film stacks up against these check back in with us in, oh say about a month’s time.
The Best
“An American In Paris” (1951)
Aside from an early Lumiere short at the 1949 festival, “An American In Paris” was the first big Cannes opener and the festival more or less knocked it out of the park to a degree that makes it surprising that there’s been so many ropey ones since. Vincente Minnelli‘s musical, which went on to win a host of Oscars including Best Picture, is admittedly a pretty loose excuse to string together a bunch of George & Ira Gershwin music. But the same could be said of many of the classic musicals, and make no mistake, this is a classic musical if ever there was one. The plot, such as there is one, centers on the titular ex-pat (Gene Kelly), a painter who’s wooed by rich girl Milo (Nina Foch), even as he falls for Lise (Leslie Caron), who’s seeing Henri (Georges Guetary), the man who kept her alive during the war. It’s not entirely successful on a narrative level (poor Milo gets a pretty raw deal here) and isn’t as lean, moving or funny as the next year’s Kelly-starring masterwork “Singin’ In The Rain,” but there’s a lovely, melancholy evocation of post-war Paris to the picture. And when Minnelli gets to play with the musical sequences, it’s positively unforgettable —Gershwin’s music, the killer choreography and near-superhuman talent of its leads creating something truly transcendent.
What they said at the time: Bosley Crowther in the New York Times said that some of the musical numbers “were contrived just to fill out empty spaces in Alan Jay Lerner’s glib but very thin script” but that “all things are forgiven when Miss Caron is on the screen.”
“Rififi” (1955)
American director Jules Dassin was targeted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1950s (he had been a Communist Party member until 1939), and fled the U.S. for France. Oddly enough, it was there that the celebrated director of such noir classics as “The Naked City” and “Brute Force” would make his inarguable masterpiece with heist classic “Rififi.” The muscular, hardboiled style of his 1940s films is much in evidence, but it’s tempered here with a Bressonian attention to detail and an indefinably cool Frenchness that prefigures the gangster-influenced New Wave films of Jean Luc Godard et al. The film is most celebrated for the bravura dialogue-free half-hour-long heist sequence that with crisp, absorbing, procedural focus follows the break-in and robbery of a jewelry store, including a terrific use for an umbrella. The film is so explicit in the heist sequence that Cannes critics weren’t the only ones who were taking notes: aspiring criminals paid attention too, leading to the banning of the film in Mexico and other territories when copycat crimes began to occur. While it’s value as an instructional manual for burglary has waned with time (pesky digitization of alarm systems!), the admiration for its consummate craft has only grown since Dassin picked up a deserved Cannes Best Director award at the festival.
What they said at the time: Francois Truffaut was glowing in his praise: “Out of the worst crime novels I ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best crime film I’ve ever seen”
“The 400 Blows” (1959)
As we wrote recently in our 15 Greatest François Truffaut Films, the great French New Wave Director not only took his frenemy Jean-Luc Godard’s adage “the only way to criticize a movie as to make another movie” at face value, switching hats from Cahiers du Cinema critic to filmmaker in 1959 and charging at full gallop out of the gate, with the seminal, wonderful “The 400 Blows.” Establishing a collaboration with actor Jean-Pierre Leaud, who would play Antoine Doinel, a thinly disguised version of Truffaut himself in five later films, here he’s just 14 years old, and while the touches of whimsy and the idiosyncrasies that come to characterize the later Doinel films are not so much in evidence here, instead we get a furiously empathetic, moving and deeply personal account of troubled youth. Doinel progresses through stages of teenagerly rebellion and truancy, graduates to petty theft and ends up in reform school, but throughout we identify with him, which is down to Truffaut’s innate confidence and supremely focussed directorial control. The film took Cannes by storm, winning Truffaut the Best Director award, which is all the more ironic considering he’d been banned from the festival the year before for denouncing the festival as archaic. This great film would not only help revitalize the festival, but would do the same for French film and for cinema history in general.
What they said at the time: Jean Cocteau was quoted in France-Soir as saying he had “never been so overwhelmed.”