Many filmmakers dream of earning a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, but success here comes with a steep downside: It sets sky-high expectations for your follow-up and the European critics can be merciless if that next film falls short.
After “The Artist” premiered at Cannes in 2011 and went on to win the best picture Oscar, the director Michel Hazanavicius returned three years later to the festival with “The Search,” which was so roundly booed that it never found a major U.S. distributor. The director Olivier Assayas followed his French hit “Clouds of Sils Maria” (2014) with “Personal Shopper” (2016), a film I actually preferred but French critics hissed at during the end credits.
And after Nicolas Winding Refn won the best director award at Cannes for the Ryan Gosling film “Drive” (2011), his next two movies were booed here. I’ll never forget that when Refn’s “The Neon Demon” concluded with a dedication to the director’s wife, Liv, a critic stood up next to me and shouted expletives at poor Liv in a thick French accent.
The latest filmmaker to face this gilded dilemma is Julia Ducournau, the French director who won the Palme d’Or four years ago for “Titane.” Rarely has that top prize gone to a movie so gory and wild: It followed a lesbian serial killer who has sex with a car, and that was just the first act! Ducournau’s Palme win felt bracingly new, not least because it was only the young director’s second movie. Where would she go from there?
In the years since, rumors swirled that Ducournau felt significant pressure to deliver a worthy follow-up. On Monday, she finally unveiled that film, “Alpha,” and Cannes critics pounced. Topping a movie as audacious as “Titane” was always going to be difficult, but the brutal reception suggests that some critics here were eager to cut Ducournau down to size.
“Alpha” stars Mélissa Boros as a 13-year-old who passes out at a party and wakes up to find the letter “A” tattooed on her arm. Her horrified mother (Golshifteh Farahani) fears that the tattoo may have been done with a contaminated needle and rushes her to the hospital for a battery of tests. In the meantime, the girl’s classmates begin to shun her, spreading rumors that she’s developed a contagious blood-borne virus.
If that sounds like a metaphor for the AIDS crisis, Ducournau pushes her point even further with a unique body-horror conceit: In the world of this film, a virus is spreading that primarily affects gay men and intravenous drug users, only this infection slowly turns people into stone. To illustrate that encroaching epidemic, Ducournau toggles between two timelines, a structure that seems deliberately disorienting. (After the first screening, two different journalists turned to me and asked, “Did that timeline make any sense to you?”)
Ducournau is nothing if not a provocateur, though she may have done her job too well this time. While Cannes critics boo less than they used to these days, they made their displeasure with “Alpha” known in other ways: One journalist told me it was the worst competition film he’d seen at Cannes in years, and the movie is currently tied with “Eddington” for second to last place on the Screen International grid, which averages scores from major critics throughout the festival.
Would they have been kinder if “Alpha” hadn’t arrived freighted with all those expectations? Ducournau may feel loyalty to Cannes for cementing her status as a major auteur, but bringing “Alpha” here guaranteed direct and perhaps unfair comparisons. A quieter debut at another festival like Venice or Toronto may have let the film stand on its own, but that’s the paradox of Cannes: It can launch a filmmaker into the stratosphere and, just as quickly, bring her back down to earth.
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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