As if that weren’t enough—and at Cannes, enough is never enough—the festival then beamed in President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine on the theater’s enormous screen. Cannes always has political undertones—or overtones, given it was famously halted by a filmmakers’ sit-in back in 1968, staged in solidarity with the student riots in Paris. But never before has a foreign head of state been invited to address moviegoers on opening night.
Seated at his desk and dressed in his uniform, Zelenskyy said: “On February 24, Russia began a war of huge proportion against Ukraine with the intention of going further into Europe. Hundreds of people die every day. They are not going to get up after the end. Will cinema stay silent, or will it talk about it? If there is a dictator, if there is a war for freedom, again it all depends on our unity. Can cinema stay out of this unity? We need a new [Charlie] Chaplin who will prove that, in our time, cinema is not silent.”
The film that followed, Final Cut, a French zombie comedy—yes, you read that right—was by Michel Hazanavicius, the director best known for 2011’s Academy Award–winning The Artist. Final Cut is a remake of the 2017 Japanese film One Cut of the Dead, and if you can’t bear fountains of blood, you will not like this movie.
Support for the Ukrainians is apparent everywhere you turn in Cannes this year. The country’s blue-and-yellow flag hangs from balconies on Rue d’Antibes, and bicolor ribbon pins are ubiquitous on tuxedo lapels. The U.S. film trade site Deadline, luxury magazine Robb Report, and the Golden Globes hosted a fundraiser for Ukrainian filmmakers on Thursday night at the American Pavilion, with a performance by the crystal-voiced Tina Karol, a Ukrainian singer who came in seventh in the 2006 Eurovision competition.
There has been an uproar over the festival’s inclusion of Tchaikovsky’s Wife, a film by Russian dissident director Kirill Serebrennikov and in part financed by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, in the competition. (Abramovich also happens to own one of France’s most beautiful estates, the Chateau de la Croë, just down the coast in Antibes.) During the film’s press conference, Serebrennikov called on France and other countries to lift economic sanctions against Abramovich, stirring the controversy that much more. “He has helped modern art and has for a long time now,” Serebrennikov said of Abramovich, who has a film fund called Kinoprime, which finances Russian art-house films. “These are not propaganda films, quite the contrary.” Despite the polemic, the film has received positive reviews, most notably for Alyona Mikhailova’s performance as the composer’s estranged wife.
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