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Workers set up a giant official poster of the 67th Cannes film festival
Workers set up a giant official poster of the 67th Cannes film festival. Photograph: Valery Hache/AFP/Getty Images
Workers set up a giant official poster of the 67th Cannes film festival. Photograph: Valery Hache/AFP/Getty Images

Cannes 2014: new blood in short supply as film festival begins

This article is more than 9 years old
As 67th edition of movie showcase opens, some critics claim it is too cosy, too predictable and too reliant on same old faces

Round up the usual suspects. The 67th Cannes film festival opens on Wednesday beneath azure skies, with hundreds of movies in the market, thousands of delegates on the prom and a rollcall of luminaries gracing the red carpet, from Mike Leigh to Jean-Luc Godard, David Cronenberg to the Dardenne brothers. Of the 19 directors competing for the crowning Palme d'Or award, no fewer than 13 have been nominated before. New blood runs thin at the front end of Cannes.

For festival director Thierry Frémaux, the issue of selection largely takes care of itself. "Great directors make great films," he says, "and they will always have a place in Cannes."

Yet critics claim that the world's most prestigious movie showcase increasingly runs the risk of becoming too cosy, too predictable, and too reliant on its rotating supergroup of international auteurs.

Hollywood columnist Jeffrey Wells likens the 2014 lineup to the membership of an "Elks lodge", a rigid list of the same old names. US critic Anne Thompson adds: "Once you're in that club, you stay there." Maybe the organisers need to start updating the files.

Nick James, editor of Sight and Sound, says the lineup looks strong – at least on paper. But that's not the problem. "What I'm concerned about is the development of new people to replace the established names," he says. "The film-makers that Cannes typically rely on are all of a similar age; they are all knocking on. In a bad year they might very well all leave us, and then who are they left with? There's also a sense that the world is changing underneath Cannes. What new generations of film fans find interesting are not necessarily what [the organisers] find interesting. They are not putting enough faith in emerging auteurs. I'd like to see Thierry Frémaux take a few more risks."

This year's event, however, looks likely to be dominated by the Cannes elite and the repeat offenders. The Dardenne brothers are two-time winners making their sixth appearance in competition with Two Days, One Night, starring Marion Cotillard as a desperate employee on a mission to save her job. Godard, the 83-year-old mainstay of French new wave, hopes to make it seventh time lucky with his 3D abstraction, Goodbye to Language. All, however, are way behind Britain's Ken Loach; Jimmy's Hall, a period drama set in Ireland, has earned its director his 12th nomination for the Palme d'Or. Might the organisers be guilty of an excess of loyalty – of basing decisions on the names in the credits as opposed to the film in the can?

"The Cannes selection is never entirely about the quality of the films," says James. It is a "political process and it follows a pattern. Those names the organisers regard as part of the academy will always find themselves in the official selection".

Writer Agnès Poirier, who helps pre-select films for inclusion, disagrees. "Critics festival say that it's always the same clientele on the red carpet," she says. "But that's not always the case. I think as much consideration is given to the film as to the director." Poirier points out that competition favourite François Ozon was recently bounced to the Un Certain Regard sidebar, while two-time champion Francis Ford Coppola

played further up the Croisette, in the boisterous atmosphere of the directors' fortnight section.

"Some film-makers are not going to accept being relegated," she admits. "But if they don't, they can always pretend that their film wasn't ready in time. There are so many conversations that take place behind closed doors."

Nor does Poirier think the main competition would benefit from an injection of fresh blood. "Fresh blood? That's what the sidebars are for. All the people we see in competition started off in critics' week, or the directors' fortnight."

Awarding the Palme d'Or to an untried director, she suggests, would be like giving the Nobel prize for literature to a first-time novelist.

Mark Cousins, a critic and film-maker, feels the festival, by and large, gets the balance right. "If there was no Cannes, we'd be desperate for one," he says. "We'd crave its bulwark against the uber-materialism of the Anglo-Saxon film world, where 'you're only as good as your last picture'." Cannes, he adds, is a very Catholic affair. "It anoints, it beatifies, it sends up its white smoke after a conclave. To be sure, it's decision-making is obscure and its choices often questionable. But its belief in cinema sainthood is exciting and fun."

Cannes film festival runs 14-25 May

Five to watch out for

Mr Turner

Mike Leigh's labour of love charts the life and times of the 19th-century painter JMW Turner. Timothy Spall headlines as the great man, scowling at the sea from his bolthole down in Margate.

The Homesman

Oscar-winning Hilary Swank stars in the western as the God-fearing spinster, Mary Bee Cuddy, charged with transporting what the festival programme describes as a wagonload of "madwomen" back from the frontier. Tommy Lee Jones co-stars and directs.

Winter Sleep

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan comes tipped for major prizes with Winter Sleep, a tale of family torments that casts a small, snowed-in hotel as both refuge and prison.

The Search

Michel Hazanavicius's last film, The Artist, used Cannes as a springboard to eventual Oscar glory. The French film-maker now returns with a marked change of pace, updating an old Montgomery Clift Holocaust drama to the 1999 Chechen war.

Clouds of Sils Maria

The Oscar-winning Juliette Binoche plays a regal, ageing actor thrown into crisis by the arrival of a younger model. French director Olivier Assayas's English-language drama co-stars Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz.

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