As ever, Gray uses personal dramas to illuminate larger political realities. In the coming-of-age film “Armageddon Time,” he drew a direct connection from the racist policies of the Reagan era to the overt white supremacy of the Trump era. In “Paper Tiger,” he seizes on a specific mid-perestroika moment, when the rapid opening up of the Soviet economy furthered the Russian mafia’s reach into American neighborhoods—and ushered in our current age of corruption, greed, and moral and environmental ruin. Gray’s sense of time and place is matched by his skill with genre conventions; not least among the film’s set pieces is a hushed, thrilling scene of men stalking each other in what looks like a cornfield, which recalls a similar sequence from “We Own the Night.” Gray may be retilling the same soil, but to poetic and visceral ends: not for the first time, he shows us how to spin corn into gold.
Will the particular potency of Gray’s latest vision find favor with this year’s jury? I’m not sure if it helps or hurts him that he is on an unenviable losing streak, having premièred five films in previous competitions, only to see all five strike out. There’s a too-common prejudice at work among international-festival juries that regards any American movie, even one as beautifully handcrafted as “Paper Tiger,” as some kind of industrial product, insufficiently innovative or rarefied within the scope of a high-art cinema event like Cannes. The rejoinder to that argument is that Gray’s fine-grained classicism has come to feel, in the A.I.-courting, franchise-obsessed Hollywood of today, like its own radically subversive gesture.
At Cannes this year, such radical potential is front of mind. On the festival’s first day, a journalist asked the jury about the role of politics in cinema—an issue that generated storms of controversy at the recent Berlin International Film Festival, where press conferences were overwhelmed by questions about Gaza, Trump, and the relationships between events onscreen and off. The Cannes jurors seemed well prepared for this, especially the screenwriter Paul Laverty, who has been Ken Loach’s most important collaborator for decades. “In every story, no matter what it is, the question of power and how it operates, and the values within the story, are implicit,” Laverty said. “It’s like the air we breathe.” He more or less echoed the sentiments of the jury president, the South Korean director Park Chan-wook, who stated simply, “I don’t think art and politics should be divided. I think it’s a strange concept to think that they’re in conflict with each other.” He cautioned, though, against letting politics overwhelm art: “Even if we are to make a brilliant political statement, if it’s not expressed artfully enough, it would just be propaganda.”
It will be fascinating to see what Park and his fellow-jurors make of one of the competition’s best-received entries, “Fatherland,” which is about the political uses—and, at times, the utter uselessness—of art and artists, especially during and after times of war. The film, the latest from the Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski, follows the novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) on a road trip, in 1949, through the rubble of a bombed-out, divided Germany. Mann, who has lived in the United States since 1939, receives a literary hero’s welcome: exiled for his defiance of the Nazi regime, he is now being honored with a prize named after Goethe, his home country’s most exalted poet. The celebration, which is being held in commemoration of Goethe’s two-hundredth birthday, will bring the Manns from Frankfurt, in an obliviously decadent West, to Weimar, in the grim, Soviet-controlled East. Both cities have a claim on Goethe’s legacy—he was born in Frankfurt, but largely worked and eventually died in Weimar—and both cities, too, will attempt to seize upon Mann as a symbol of Germany’s postwar rebirth.
