This year’s film festival is dominated by movies made in English by non-native English-speaking directors. Is this an ominous sign of Hollywood killing off foreign cinema?In an ever-globalising movie world, the Cannes film festival is cinema’s equivalent of a national park: a sanctuary for the endangered breed of foreign cinema, fortified against the omnivorous depredations of Hollywood. That’s the theory, anyway. But looking at this year’s official selection, an Anglophone virus appears to be on the rampage. Of the 20 films in competition at Cannes, only three are made by native English-speakers: Gus van Sant and Todd Haynes from the US, and Australia’s Justin Kurzel. Yet more than half of them are partially or entirely in the English language. Many of them are by formerly dependable auteurs, crossing over into English for the first time, and many of them feature high-profile American and British actors.Take Greece’s Yorgos Lanthimos, purveyor of strange, unsettling, parallel-world tales such as Dogtooth and Alps. His latest work, The Lobster, looks of a piece with its predecessors, in that it’s about people being turned into animals if they fail to find a mate. Except Lanthimos filmed it in Dublin, in English, with a cast led by Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz and John C Reilly. It’s a similar story with Matteo Garrone. He won the Cannes Grand Jury prize in 2008 with his mafiosi exposé Gomorrah – as Italian a movie as you could wish for. His latest, The Tale of Tales, looks to be a twisted, grownup fairytale involving mythical beasts and the devouring of internal organs. The cast includes Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, Toby Jones and, again, Reilly. Continue reading...
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