The 77th Cannes Film Festival is set to kick off today, May 14, with the familiar Cannes mix of excitement and controversy. The excitement surrounds a handful of main-competition titles that journalists and industry players are champing at the bit to see. That’s the kind of anticipation the festival wants: perhaps morbid curiosity about Megalopolis, a self-financed Francis Ford Coppola film that could be brilliant, a boondoggle, or both; Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, the followup to his Oscar-bedecked Poor Things; and the two-part film Horizon: An American Saga, Kevin Costner’s grand Western-epic return to the director’s chair.
But other matters have, in these early hours of the festival, stolen focus from the movies soon to be on offer. There is the very real potential for a strike, as freelance festival workers demand inclusion in France’s ever-mutating unemployment assistance infrastructure. Should these thousands of workers walk off the job for a good cause, the festival would be thrown into unimaginable disarray. Unlike a lot of North American festivals, Cannes does not rely on a legion of willing volunteers. These are paid, seasonal jobs that do not enjoy the same protections as other avenues of employment in the country.
The other sword of Damocles hanging over the festival is a rumored blockbuster article that could drop any day—or hour. It is said to be a damning piece of reporting that outs a host of prominent men who have perpetuated a culture of sexual abuse within the French film industry. The names implicated are rumored to be big ones indeed. Six and a half years after the #MeToo movement swept the United States, France seems finally due for its own true reckoning—one fomenting in recent months. Many on the ground in France believe that a lot of big names in the industry have enjoyed protection from consequences for far too long.
Traditionally, Cannes thrives off of controversy—the festival seems to court it, in one way or another, every year. The buzz is enjoyed, helping to maintain the festival’s reputation as both venerable and risqué. But this feels like a different sort of attention, should it arrive. Labor struggles and sexual abuse are not mere lightning-rod topics—they are pretinent social matters that Cannes can’t simply absorb with a wry smirk. We’ll have to wait and see how, if at all, these twin earthquakes affect this year’s festival. Even if the big-swing movies are nothing to write home about, plenty else on the Croisette could very well be.