At Cannes Film Festival, ‘Paper Tiger’ Roars and the Lothario Life of David Lean Revisited

After eleven days of screenings, crushing deadlines, and moderately cool weather the 2026 Cannes Film Festival is winding to a close. The big awards ceremony will happen tonight, and the smart money is saying that the Palme d’Or will be won by….a film that most pleases the jury for political-cultural reasons. Mere cinematic quality hasn’t been a deciding factor for many years, certainly not since woke cultism became rife within media and industry circles in 2017.Two New York City films resonated big-time this year — James Gray’s “Paper Tiger,” a partly fact-based, family-centric, film-noir tragedy, and Ira Sachs’ “The Man I Love,” an authentic late 1980s drama about a West Village-residing, AIDS-afflicted cabaret performer, and his somewhat careless gay lifestyle, played by Rami Malek in a sure-to-be-Oscar-nominated performance — the best role he’s had since playing Freddie Mercury in 2018’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,”“Tiger” is set in the mean streets of Queens and Brooklyn, and delivers a boilerplate serving of turbulent brotherly conflict. (A none-too-bright Miles Teller and wife Scarlett Johansson versus swaggering older brother Adam Driver). Brooklyn’s super-polluted Gowanus Canal, which I’d never even heard of until I saw Gray’s film, plays a major supporting role. Plus “Tiger” has a great shoot-out sequence — Mr. Driver against the Russians — in a thicket of tall weeds. Set during the mid to late 1980s, “Tiger” is basically a “don’t mess with the Russian mob psychos” deal, as well as a “life can be horrifically unfair” thing.What was the biggest, strongest, most power-punchy film of the festival? Easily Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord,” a Norwegian small-town drama about a Christian conservative couple (Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve) who are unfairly persecuted by a small clique of left-progressives who, under the authority of Norway’s child protection services, take their five kids from them (including a suckling infant) due to unfounded suspicions that they may have physically abused them. “Fjord” is about woke lefties punishing a strict Christian family for being a strict Christian family. The Romanian-born Mungiu (“Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days”) is careful to deploy a somewhat ambiguous brush and in so doing avoid black-and-white condemnation of this or that character or chorus. But this isn’t just a story about progressive Norway overlords — it’s really a morally clear takedown of tyrannical, woke-minded scolds, and therefore a tale that will resonate both among fair-minded centrists and conservatives the world over.Will “Fjord” win the festival’s coveted Palme d’Or? Or the second-place Grand Prix trophy? Hard to say. The fact that many top-tier critics have written that “Fjord” tells a politically ambiguous story and therefore “pointedly doesn’t take sides” (per Deadline’s Pete Hammond) suggests that the jury might harbor similar feelings. Or they might decide that awarding a film that strongly condemns hard-left culture should, for the sake of their friends, be elbowed aside.Did I experience any festival wildness or weirdness? Not really as parties aren’t much of a thing at Cannes these days. Did I hang out or have dinner with any beautiful, glamorously-dressed blondes? Yeah, I did — Brazilian journalist and Pina founder Jennifer Queen. Drinks and dinners aside, we were basically screening bros, saving each other seats and sussing out the films.Last Tuesday evening I witnessed an alarming medical emergency inside the Salle Bazin, right as Pedro Almovodar’s “Bitter Christmas” had begun to screen and, ironically, during a scene in a hospital emergency clinic. A 60ish, frizzy-haired guy sitting ten feet away loudly moaned in his seat (“aaaggghhh!”) and seemed to pass out. I thought for two or three seconds that an actor in Pedro’s make-believe hospital was performing some kind of seizure or what-have-you, but then I realized this was real. Many in the rows in front of and behind “Mr. Frizzy” reacted in this or that concerned way, standing up and staring, shouting “stop the film…turn on the lights!” Nobody wanted to touch the poor guy, possibly out of fear of being sued, more likely due to an ick factor. They all just stared. Two EMTs arrived and went into the theatre. They finally wheeled the guy out in a wheelchair. He was conscious and seemed nowhere near death’s door. Tragedy avoided.The other major Palme d’Or contender and quite possibly the likeliest winner is Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland”, an austere, pared-to-the-bone, 82-minute black-and-white road movie about legendary novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Huller) driving through West and East Germany in 1949, and being feted at every stop. The issue at hand is the recent suicide of Mann’s novelist son Klaus (August Diehl), and how the elder Mann deftly sidesteps this tragedy. Huller, co-star of the recently-released, hugely popular “Project Hail Mary,” seems likely to win the festival’s Best Actress award.The coolest movie-star encounter, for me, was with the great Bruce Dern, 89, who took a bow before a screening of a grade-A tribute doc — “Dernsie: The Amazing Life of Bruce Dern “— at the Salle Bunuel. Mike Mendez’s 111-minute doc is no one’s idea of a mindblowing film but is certainly a highly enjoyable stroll through a good man’s life. Plus Mr. Dern, whose legs are gone —two guys were holding him up as he walked to the small stage — took a bow and shared a few thoughts before the film began, and that was cool.I also had a nice, soothing time with Barnaby Thompson’s “Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean,” which wowed, massaged, comforted, reminded and amused. It’s a career-profile documentary of the late, great director that does everything you want it to do.The doc informs that Lean’s romantic life was episodic, fitful, and even turbulent. Thompson doesn’t shrink from the fact that Lean was a serious hound — the sexual conquests were allegedly in the hundreds — and that he wasn’t much of a stayer. Lean apparently lived for those first-bloom hormonal highs, but once the relationship settled into the usual humdrum, up-and-down, “we-need-to-put-in-the-work” phase, he was always sniffing around for the next one. Or so it seemed. David Lean on the set of ‘Doctor Zhivago’ in 1965. Wikimedia CommonsThe narrator of “Maverick”, Kenneth Branagh reads two or three love letters that Lean wrote over the decades, and the last one, a heartfelt confession, penned in the early ‘80s to the much-younger Sandra Holt, suggested that Lean was something of a serial cad, crooning the same old sentiments decade after decade. This prodded an audible reaction inside the Salle Bunuel — women coughing, groaning, clearing their throats, chuckling. It was hilarious.Incidentally it threw up a mystery. The first scene in Lean‘s 1962 epic “Lawrence of Arabia” depicts the motorcycle death of T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole). It tells us that Lawrence was speeding so fast that when he saw two wobbly bicyclists that he veered away, losing control and getting wiped out. But Pathe newsreel footage shows that Lawrence crashed into the rear tire of one of the bicyclists, and this is what caused his death. Why did Lean reject this and choose his own accident scenario? I’ver seen about 19 films so far with another two or three to go. Casual moviegoers are strongly urged to at least catch “Fjord”, which, if you consider the import, essentially explains why a signifiant percentage of independent voters voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. They didn’t want that woke nonsense in their lives.The festival’s most viscerally exciting film didn’t play in competition — Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco‘s “The Match,” a highly intelligent, perfectly edited and fully rousing recollection of the 1986 FIFA World Cup soccer match between Argentina and England. It leaves you feeling charged and elated by the wondrous athleticism of the late Diego Maradona and was rapturously received, to put it mildly.Finally, John Travolta showed up with a movie that he’d directed, but which no one paid any attention to, a childhood remembrance thing, set in the early ’60s, called “Propeller One-Way Night Coach.” It’s about the young Travolta-like character, curiously named Jeff, flying with his mother on a propeller-plane, cross-country flight to Hollywood. I wasn’t opposed to seeing it but you have to be practical about your festival choices. You have to choose value.That aside, the festival chiefs treated Travolta graciously by giving him an honorary Palme d’Or, which is basically a Life Achievement Award. “Surprise complétement!,” Vinnie Barbarino exclaimed in French. “I can’t believe this. This is the last thing I expected.” But he did expect it, of course, because he’d been informed in advance. The thing that seemed to matter most to onlookers was the nicely-styled beret that Travolta wore. I haven’t spoken to Travolta since 1995, at a Beverly Hills press junket for Desmond Nakano‘s “White Man’s Burden” He was looking thinner than usual so I asked him for his dietary secret. “Eat anything you want,” he replied, “but only eat half.”

At Cannes Film Festival, ‘Paper Tiger’ Roars and the Lothario Life of David Lean Revisited

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