Cannes So Far: Income Inequality, Ticket Troubles and the Ghost of COVID
thewrap.comas Gray made clear during his Cannes press conference. “How’d we get here?” he said. “Where there’s, like, two people who own everything and a bunch of authoritarians trying to take over the planet?”Ruben Ostlund’s “Triangle of Sadness,” meanwhile, is satiric comedy as political statement, a movie awash in booze and vomit that situates its broadest sequences on a $250 million luxury yacht.
It’s the final scene in “Monty Python’s Meaning of Life” mixed with Lina Wertmuller’s “Swept Away,” an evisceration of the way we enshrine inequality while insisting that everyone’s equal. (By the way, the “triangle of sadness” is apparently that spot in the middle of a runway model’s forehead that needs Botox.) Another film that highlighted these same inequalities, while shining a light on the lack of privilege that is most people’s reality, was “Rodeo” by young filmmaker Lola Quivoron.
The story follows a young rebellious woman – her own kind of sociopath – as she joins a gang of motorbike thieves in France – young men of African and Muslim origin, mostly – using crime as a way out of poverty.
Before these films, the festival has been dominated by things that aren’t on the screens of the festival’s theaters: the war in Ukraine that caused some filmmakers to criticize Cannes’ policy of not banning Russian filmmakers and journalists; a new ticketing system that created huge headaches for festivalgoers; and the spectre of COVID-19, which has been largely ignored but is definitely on people’s minds.
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