A Swirl of Activity at Cannes

Three days in, much seems the same or close enough. The stars are promenading down the red carpet past the thousands who daily congregate in front of the Palais, the concrete sprawl that serves as the festival’s headquarters. Gawkers and attendees are, in turn, under the watch of heavily armed police and army. Last year, France ended the state of emergency that had been in place since the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris; new legislation, however, instituted some of the same security measures put in place after the attacks.

Even as security measures have tightened at the festival, the guards searching our bags seem friendlier. It’s a subtle softening that suggests the festival knows it was unnerving to dash past armed guards on the way to the opening attraction, “Everybody Knows,” a melodrama from Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, a Cannes favorite whose credits include “A Separation.”

“Everybody Knows” stars a strong Penélope Cruz as Laura, whose teenager is kidnapped while the family is visiting her Spanish hometown. Cruz’s husband, Javier Bardem, plays Laura’s former lover, Paco, a winemaker whose good fortunes have stirred resentment in her family. Farhadi’s script is far too busy — the movie is crammed with characters and underexplored themes, including class tensions, nativism and ugly attitudes toward migrant workers — but he’s exceptionally deft at mining the spaces that open up between people, particularly during a crisis.

At his news conference, Farhadi said he hoped that Jafar Panahi, whose movie “3 Faces” is in competition and who’s barred by Iran from leaving the country — could attend Cannes. That Panahi could not be here is, Farhadi said, “something that I have difficulty living with.”

Perhaps because Iran is so often demonized in the United States and its auteurs are so often rightly venerated at Cannes, it was widely noted that the day that “Everybody Knows” had its premiere, President Donald Trump announced that the United States was withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. (In 2017, Farhadi boycotted the Oscars in protest of the president’s travel ban; his film “The Salesman” went on to win the best foreign-language Oscar.) Politics are never far from any global festival although, with its insistent emphasis on glamour, Cannes does its best to attenuate life’s harsher truths. At the opening-night party, Farhadi joined his stars in a vaulted space with glittering lights.

As Kristen Stewart, one of five women on the eight-person main jury, smoked on a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, “Black Panther” director Ryan Coogler — here to give a master class — recalled his first trip to Cannes, which was his first overseas trip. He then introduced himself to Benicio Del Toro, who’s leading another jury.

The festival often takes a few days to get its groove on, and this year is no exception. The movies have been fine if often familiar, including A.B. Shawky’s “Yomeddine,” a misty, feel-good Egyptian road movie about a leper who sets off on a journey with a cherubic Nubian named Obama. If Harvey Weinstein were still in business, this surely would be a contender next awards season. The most surprising thing about this bright, cheerful, inevitably moving movie is that it is in the main competition, a programming decision that may have less to do with the movie and more with French sensitivities about the Arab world.

Then again, it may be that Shawky has Netflix to thank for his slot. When Netflix bowed out, it took several hotly anticipated titles, including the latest from Alfonso Cuarón and Paul Greengrass. On the plus side, fewer big names may force attendees to seek out less-known ones like Wanuri Kahiu, whose “Rafiki,” a sweet and bitter story of two Kenyan women who fall in love, owes a debt to Dee Rees’ “Pariah” as it maintains its own tough-minded integrity.

Even with Netflix gone, it remains a topic of conversation. Since it withdrew, its chief executive, Reed Hastings, seems to be at least thinking about an olive branch, recently telling an audience at a television festival (ahem) that “sometimes we make mistakes” and that the company was “not trying to disrupt the movie system; we are trying to make our members happy.” Put differently, Netflix is a multinational corporation that delivers an incessant visual flow to its 125 million or so subscribers. Cannes shows movies to other industry professionals seeking to serve their own audiences.

To grasp the implications of this fight, you need to see that Cannes is very much France itself — economically, politically, culturally. Françoise Nyssen, the minister of culture, wrote in the official catalog, “This year, I would like to showcase a special cause: gender equality,” which will be difficult at a festival that fails to champion the work of women as much as it should.

The board of directors of Cannes includes representatives from French organizations across the entertainment industry. Last year, one of these, the theatrical exhibitors guild FNCF, protested the festival’s inclusion of the Netflix titles “Okja” and “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)” because it wouldn’t be releasing them in French theaters.

So, it’s complicated, which is why it is exasperating that the faceoff between Cannes and Netflix is too often merely framed as evidence of French intransigence, of a fusty festival not being hip to the demands of the young audience. The system known as the French cultural exception works, at least for some in the industry. Right now, movies that open in France need to play in theaters 36 months before they start streaming. That might seem an outrageous eternity for on-demand appetites, but this rule is part of a European Union system that helps finance European movies and TV, bringing work to big and small screens.

Maybe the system needs to change or maybe Netflix does or maybe both. Whatever the case, worries about the dominance of the American entertainment industry have long been a refrain in France and elsewhere. While quotas, taxes and protective measures can seem, well, foreign to some Americans, consider that last weekend “Avengers: Infinity War” was the top box-office draw everywhere from Australia to Ukraine. The people who benefit the most from this global domination are those on the board of the Walt Disney Co. Meanwhile, I am still thinking about “Donbass,” a harsh, mordant Ukrainian movie from Sergei Loznitsa that feels very Cannes.

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