Cannes Festival 2021 – Culture

The Cannes Festival loves and defends its traditions, no pandemic changes that, the rest of the world can shake its head for as long as it wants. One of these traditions is the so-called scandal film, which can be found in almost every competition selection, and which, of course, is not a scandal from the festival organizers’ point of view, but the current litmus test for the freedom of cinema to ignore the limits of shame and taste, to set morale guards in an uproar and to ensure night-long discussions with lots of rosé. But seldom has such a scandal been as announced as Paul Verhoeven’s “Benedetta” this year.

It starts with the fact that the now 82-year-old director from the Netherlands has to defend a reputation as a sex-obsessed provocateur, which began in Europe with “Turkish Fruits”, culminated in Hollywood with excesses like “Basic Instinct” and “Showgirls” and now is still gushing money sources in France. His last Cannes entry in the competition was “Elle”, in which Isabelle Huppert, a rape victim, begins to use the psychopathic perpetrator for her own pleasure. The joke is that you can read such films as feminist statements, but of course the dollar signs are still circling the eyes of every veteran sex-and-crime producer.

Verhoeven says his film cannot be blasphemous, the truth is simply the truth

Then of course you want to step up, and what could be more suitable than blood-spattered religious visions, young nuns whose bodies are exposed, explicit sex scenes behind monastery walls and criminal intrigues in the Catholic Church? All of this is “Benedetta”, but also the film adaptation of an elaborately researched historical non-fiction book: Judith C. Brown’s “Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Now in Renaissance Italy”, which uses trial files from the 17th century to provide unusual insights into the dealing with homosexuality at the time. That is why his film cannot be blasphemous at all, says Verhoeven, after all, the truth is simply the truth.

Believing Christians will certainly see it differently, for example when a wooden statue of the Madonna is carved so that it can be used as a dildo in the lovemaking of the two nuns Benedetta (Virginie Efira) and Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia). Hollywood is trembling at the new “Intimacy Coordinators”, Verhoeven seems to say, but as a movie-history-registered old man I allow myself to give a shit about all the new rules. And that’s how sensationally he staged. But: Why did the consistently great actresses and actors take part, and why are they fully committed to their work on the red carpet? Because “Benedetta” is evil and often very funny about the greed of the church, the tendency of people to deceive and self-deception up to the belief in miracles, the fine line between enlightenment and delusion. You will have to take a closer look on days that are a little less hot.

In the end, one can only hope for forgiveness from generous children

After this excitement, the competition continues more calmly, and it is now finally family relationships that have emerged as the central theme of this year’s festival. As a parent you can go wrong, and filmmakers as diverse as the American actor and outsider filmmaker Sean Penn and the Italian master director Nanni Moretti come to this conclusion – and in the end you can only hope for the generosity of the children who will one day must forgive. In Penn’s drama “Flag Day” this has a special touch because it is here that he makes her first big cinema appearance as the director of his own daughter Dylan Penn, 30. And now you can talk about parenting pride and nepotism as much as you want, but this actress, who looks like the face of her mother Robin Wright, was really ready for her big appearance in Cannes.

In her book “Flim-Flam Man: The True Story Of My Father’s Counterfeit Life”, the journalist Jennifer Vogel told the life of her father, who became an incorrigible liar on the hunt for the American dream that everyone around him Heart broke. Your story is the basis of “Flag Day”, Sean Penn plays this man himself, chased by debts, false hopes and failed business ideas, and the scenes in which his gaze begs for his daughter’s love and approval have a long lasting effect. Dylan Penn is just as convincing when she plays the longing that the father just wants to be there and tell the truth. Of course, one suspects that the two are negotiating their own issues via the detour of strangers’ lives – the breakups and reconciliations in the Penn / Wright house are legend in Hollywood, seldom has a marriage been wilder back and forth, there will be things to be forgiven. But to give the daughter the gift of such a role – that is truly practical reparation.

How did the son become what he is? Nanni Moretti suggests this in his portrayal of the father

Nanni Moretti also prefers to play the father who ruined the life of his son and, basically, that of his wife in his film “Tre Piani / Three floors”. We get to know him as a grizzled judge who speaks few words , reveals himself to be a conscientious and deeply honest man in every one of his utterances. His son, on the other hand, seems to be irretrievably lost when the film begins, he drives a woman to death in a drunkenness, shows no remorse, breaks his house arrest and tries to wriggle out of a long prison sentence. At the same time, other stories are told, based on the novel “About Us” by the Israeli author Eshkol Nevo, which all take place in the same upper-class house in a quiet district of Rome.

They are all about male errors and familial ruptures that at some point can no longer be healed, and they are not all equally convincing. How the son became what he is only slowly becomes clear after the father’s death, when his wife gradually frees herself from the Puritan hell of righteousness that her husband built with her help. The women have to pass on hope – but then it is Moretti’s figure in its extreme economy, which consists practically only of hint and reduction that will stay in the memory longer than all summer night “scandal film” debates.