At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, beach clubs have become battlegrounds. Every after-party I attend has been the site of a heated debate, as journalists and industry insiders fight about the polarizing films vying for the Palme d’Or.
During the soiree for “Paper Tiger,” a New York thriller starring Miles Teller and Adam Driver, I predicted that their co-star Scarlett Johansson would become a major Oscar contender. Glowering over a glass of wine, another awards pundit declared that Johansson’s performance — with its big accent, big emotions, and big hair — was Razzie-worthy.
At another party, the talky drama “All of a Sudden” generated its own talky drama, as one passionate dissenter faced off against several fans. Was this three-hour film from the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi (“Drive My Car”) a tear-jerking humanist triumph or a self-satisfied lecture? The argument got so animated that you might have mistaken it for the deliberations of the Cannes jury itself.
Mixed reactions are a given at any film festival, but I’ve rarely seen as many that are this mixed. On the Screen Daily jury grid, which compiles scores from a dozen critics on a scale from one to four, consensus has been hard to come by: Nearly every competition film, including Asghar Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales” and the Javier Bardem vehicle “The Beloved,” runs the gamut from three stars to a measly one.
That ought to make this year’s Palme race a tough one to call. While watching “Fjord,” a strong Norwegian drama starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, I wondered whether it could earn a second Palme for the director Cristian Mungiu, who in 2007 won for “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.” Then, as the closing credits began, the journalist in front of me broke into derisive laughter.
But I don’t expect any competition film still to come will prove more polarizing than “Hope,” a South Korean action movie that premiered Sunday night to love-it-or-hate-it reactions. Directed by Na Hong-jin (“The Wailing”), it’s nearly three hours of nonstop action as a besieged town tries to fend off rampaging aliens. Those beasts are played by Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, who have been transformed via motion-capture technology into some of the most egregious-looking creatures you have ever seen, as though James Cameron tried to render his Na’vis with nothing but a dented Nintendo GameCube.
“Hope” is thin on character but long on action scenes in which people shoot at CGI monsters that never, ever die, and I found it to be stultifying slop made by people who should know better. The critic Peter Howell agreed, positing that the “biggest mystery at Cannes this year is how this steamy load of dodgy CGI and inane plotting managed to make it into the Palme competition.”
And yet! People I respect — or at least respected until now — are still going to bat for “Hope.” The Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney praised the film for its “sharply drawn characters” even though, when last I checked, France does not formally celebrate Opposite Day. On social media, the writer Iana Murray is so “Hope”-pilled that she has begun campaigning for it to win the Palme.
Still, if “Hope” manages to buck common sense and win the top prize, that would be emblematic of just how split this year’s slate has been. And, at the very least, I know the feuds about it at the closing-night party would be legendary.
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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