Cannes 2017, Day Eight: Beguiling Women (and Some Zombies)
Some decades down the line, how will the 70th Cannes Film Festival be remembered? From an in-the-moment point of view, this jubilee iteration of the venerable event is being shaped by the forces of new media – streaming platforms, virtual reality, TV-as-cinema – and women. Lots of women – behind the camera, in front of the camera, telling women’s stories and universal themes from a female perspective. In the space of the last two days, as the festival winds down to its home stretch, we’ve seen the peak of these forces at play, with the impact of Alejandro Iñarritu’s VR experience Carne y Arena, the screenings of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake 2: China Girl and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return and, today, Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled. A massive, storied event like the Cannes Film Festival is, by nature, a slow moving beast. But how beautiful it looks when in motion.