Cannes Film Festival Shocker: Big Swings, Epic Faceplants, and Reality Gets Sidelined!

As the punk band Fontaines D.C. blares from the soundtrack of “Bird,” we follow the main character Bug, portrayed by Barry Keoghan, through the streets of Gravesend, Kent, east of London. Shirtless and heavily tattooed, Bug navigates the streets on an e-scooter, his 12-year-old daughter Bailey (played by Nykiya Adams) holding onto him tightly.

Bug, ever the optimist, plans to finance his upcoming wedding by selling hallucinogenic slime he extracts from a toad he brought in from Colorado. Despite having a large centipede tattoo adorning his face and neck, he’s disheartened when Bailey decides to cut her hair short before the wedding. The young girl is entering her rebellious teenage years and isn’t too thrilled about the idea of having a new stepmother.

“Bird” reflects the gritty realism for which British director Andrea Arnold (“American Honey”) is well-known. Every scene is more decrepit than the last, and it seems each door is just waiting to be broken down by an abusive boyfriend.

But when Bailey’s eerie friend, the mysterious title character (played by Franz Rogowski of “Passages”), suddenly sprouts huge CGI wings in a predictable moment of protective vengeance, the film loses its realness.

“Bird” represents the problem with the blurred line between reality and fantasy that has become prominent at Cannes. Highly anticipated films such as George Miller’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” have disappointed many with their lack of physical believability and warmth, respectively.

Perhaps the pursuit of authenticity in cinema is overrated. It’s easy to try and impose a cohesive aesthetic on a film festival, but the reality is often more disjointed, as attendees jump from screening to screening. It seems many of the offerings in the first week of Cannes were products of the pandemic and, as such, exuded a sense of desperation.

Paul Schrader’s “Oh, Canada,” a slow-paced, 95-minute film about the unraveling of reputational integrity, is a good example. The film stars Richard Gere as Leonard Fife, a renowned left-wing documentarian who, despite battling late-stage cancer, agrees to be interviewed on camera by some of his most devoted students. As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that Leonard’s reputation may not be as solid as it seems.

And then there’s Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Kinds of Kindness,” which, despite a promising start, turns into a lackluster trio of short films. The talented cast, featuring Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, and Margaret Qualley, can’t save the weak script penned by Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou.

However, one filmmaker who has truly captured the dreamlike atmosphere of Cannes is Zambia-born Rungano Nyoni. Her film “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” which is featured in the Un Certain Regard section, centers around the rituals of mourning. As the main character Shula navigates the death of her uncle, the film takes on a haunting, trance-like quality.

Despite the festival’s shift towards fantasy, the rawness of Nyoni’s film brings a much-needed touch of reality to Cannes.