Actors Miles Teller and Adam Driver at the 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in France on Sunday.VALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
It took a tense gunfight, a surprise appearance by Guy “Flavortown” Fieri and a polarizing Scarlett Johansson performance to shake Cannes awake after a string of sleepy disappointments and head-scratchers.
Going into the film festival’s opening weekend, critics and industry players were starting to nervously dart their eyes all over town, everyone wondering aloud whether Cannes had lost its auteur touch. The sun was shining and the stars were out – or at least, such top European names as Vincent Cassel and Sandra Hüller – but one master filmmaker after another was falling flat on their face, if not offering outright stinkers.
Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales attempts to pay homage to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog by way of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window but instead offers audiences an overflowing bucket of dramatic slop. The tepid applause that greeted the film’s world premiere inside the massive Palais theatre was incredible to witness in its awkwardness. Meanwhile, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s sappy sci-fi melodrama Sheep in the Box represents a sharp decline from his previous film, the elliptical 2023 drama Monster, to say nothing of the emotional highs of his Palme d’Or-winning 2018 film Shoplifters.
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While Pawel Pawlikowski’s post-Second World War travelogue Fatherland has much to admire, including standout performances from Hüller and August Diehl, its barely-feature-length run time gives the impression of a missed opportunity. And though I sunk deeply into the pleasures and sheer optimism of Soudain, the latest marathon-length character study from Drive My Car director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, I recognize that its extended detours into philosophical monologuing will test many others’ patience.
So, late Saturday night, all eyes turned toward one of the only two U.S. films playing the festival’s official competition program: James Gray’s Paper Tiger.
On, well, paper, the film promised everything that Cannes needed for a quick turnaround. Gray (Two Lovers, The Immigrant, Armageddon Time) is a long-time Cannes staple, even if he’s had an up-and-down relationship with French critics. But with Paper Tiger, the New Yorker was returning to his surest-thing territory, the tri-borough crime drama, which he’s mastered with Little Odessa, The Yards and We Own the Night.
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The new movie also boasted the biggest Hollywood firepower of the entire festival: Miles Teller, Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, the last two stars staging a kind of Marriage Story reunion. The clincher: Paper Tiger had been acquired for U.S. distribution shortly before the festival began by Neon, the Cannes-crazy tastemakers whose films have won the past six Palmes d’Or. Sweet made-in-America relief had finally washed up on the shores of the French Riviera! Très bien.
Well, more or less. While some critics were eager to immediately proclaim Paper Tiger to be an operatic masterwork, the 1980s-set crime drama feels like the best film that Gray might have made a decade and a half ago.
Cast and crew attend the 'Paper Tiger' news conference at the 79th annual Cannes Film Festival on Sunday.Pool/Getty Images
The movie, which follows two Jewish brothers (Driver and Teller) as they get themselves into a heap of trouble with Russian gangsters in Queens, is beautifully shot, gritty, and warm and inviting in a way that hearkens back to such classic NYC thrillers as Serpico and The French Connection. The violence is striking, including one gunfight sequence in the meadowlands that appears to recall the final stretch of We Own the Night.
And the performances simmer till they explode, even if Johansson’s turn as the world’s most beautifully frumpy housewife is either brilliant or wildly unhinged. I fall into the former camp, but there was fierce debate on the streets afterward.
Overall, though, there just isn’t the kind of deep thematic richness that Gray specializes in – perhaps the film moves too fast, or the mechanics of the plot (which revolve around one exceptionally stupid decision by Teller’s character) are too rickety. But, clearly seeking some kind of cinematic salvation, the Cannes audience loved every minute, awarding it an extended standing ovation and plenty of hoots for the high-wattage cast, even though Johansson was MIA. (Gray tried, and failed, to FaceTime the actress on his iPhone while the closing credits rolled.)
Deep into Sunday afternoon, I was still thinking about Paper Tiger – but perhaps not as much as I was wondering about Guy Fieri, the bleach-blond bro-chef who inexplicably walked the premiere’s red carpet. Is Fieri a buddy of Gray’s? Was he catering the afterparty with unholy and certainly un-Kosher spins on traditional Jewish cuisine? Is he a secret cinephile? Maybe Cannes has all the America it needs, after all.