Dust off your tuxes and grab those high heels, the Cannes Film Festival is just around the corner.
Making its return to May for the first time since 2019 (2020’s festival was canceled outright, 2021’s was shuffled to July), this year’s celebration of international cinema and conspicuous wealth is gearing up to be a big one. While the official announcement of what will compete for the Palme D’Or (and appear in the many sidebars) has yet to be revealed, Variety has some better-than-educated guesses, and it includes some surprises.
The biggie, according to the trade, is the unexpected return of David Lynch with a project that has heretofore been completely secret. Not much about it is known—it could be a feature film, or the festival could be debuting the first episodes of a series as they did with “Twin Peaks: The Return” in 2017. (Showtime CEO David Nevins has expressed that all Lynch has to do is make the call to set something up.) Variety reported that the cast will include Laura Dern and “other Lynch regulars.”
Lynch’s “Wild at Heart,” starring Dern, Nicolas Cage, and Willem Dafoe won the Palme D’or in 1990. He also won the Best Director award in 2001 for “Mulholland Drive” (shared with Joel Coen and Ethan Coen for “The Man Who Wasn’t There.”) In 1999, his marvelous, G-rated picture “The Straight Story” had its debut there, but in 1992, his “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” was met with a notorious round of Cannes boos, which some at this point consider a right of passage.
But in an interview with Entertainment Weekly published on Tuesday, Lynch denied he was going to Cannes with a new film.
"I have no new film coming out. That's a total rumor. So there you are. It is not happening. I don't have a project. I have nothing at Cannes. It's unfortunate. It got built up that people thought, 'Oh, that'd be nice,'" Lynch said. " ut there is something new, but it's not mine. I don't know whose it is. They say there's something new at Cannes, and they don't say whose it is, and some people thought it was my film, but it's not. So we'll wait and see, and see whose it is."
Other big arthouse guns likely to play the festival include “Crimes of the Future,” which is reportedly not a remake of David Cronenberg’s own 1970 hour-long film of the same name. The new one stars Léa Seydoux, Viggo Mortensen, and Kristen Stewart. Cannes will also likely host George Miller’s “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” a fantasy film starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, and there’s talk of Kelly Reichardt showing up with ‘Showing Up,” in which Michelle Williams stars as an artist, with appearances from Hong Chau, Judd Hirsch, and John Magaro.
Other Cannes veterans who might be returning include James Gray, Kore-eda Hirokazu, Park Chan-wook, Luca Guadagnino, and Alejandro González Iñárritu. We’ll know more in a few days!
From a Hollywood perspective, though, we can bank on three wide-tent pictures using the festival as a premiere forum, Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” (with Tom Hanks as Col. Tom Parker), and Joseph Kosinski’s heavily Covid-delayed “Top Gun: Maverick” with Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, and Jennifer Connelly. The Pixar film “Lightyear,” with the voice of Chris Evans as the title character, was rumored to be included in the lineup as well. But Deadline reported the animated movie will not make the trip to France for its debut.
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