Cannes: An Ecumenical Matter

Cannes has long been maligned as a sunny place for shady people. Despite its apparent superficiality, there is a significant spiritual dimension to the Cannes film festival, and to Cannes itself. Cannes has been an important ecclesiastical centre for learning since the fifth century, when Lérins Abbey was established on nearby Saint-Honorat Island. As I discovered when I was making my new film, Quintessentially Irish, Saint Patrick was educated here prior to evangelising Ireland.

One of the key awards at the film festival is the prestigious Ecumenical Prize. Ever since its establishment in 1974, the Ecumenical jury is asked to pick the film from the festival’s official selection that best “touches the spiritual dimension of our existence”. At the 76^th edition, it was spoilt for choice with films that featured a variety of spiritual storylines and intriguing characters.

Catholicism was depicted in the stylish opening-night film, Jeanne du Barry, starring Johnny Depp as Louis XV and Maïwenn as his eponymous mistress. We are introduced to the teenage du Barry being thrown out of a convent and follow her journey into the arms of the king. In a poignant deathbed scene Louis XV, ravaged by smallpox, is instructed by his confessor to renounce his relationship with his mistress. A tearful Johnny Depp acquiesces and informs Jeanne that he is only doing so to avoid hell. After she is banished, we see du Barry enter the Pont-aux-Dames convent in Meaux. Jeanne du Barry is sumptuous and lavishly shot and uses real locations to good effect, including the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

Martin Scorsese’s The Killers of the Flower Moon, with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, is based on a true story about the Osage Indian Nation who became the wealthiest people in the world when oil was discovered on their land in the early twentieth century. The film centres around Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a wealthy and devout Catholic Osage Indian, who has the misfortune of marrying her predatory chauffeur (DiCaprio). He plots to kill Mollie’s mother and sisters to ensure that he inherits their wealth. Mollie survives her husband’s attempts to poison her, but the rest of her family are not so lucky. After the premiere Scorsese hot-footed it to the Vatican for an audience with Pope Francis and announced that he was writing a new film about Jesus.

The complex French-language courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Fall, deservedly won this year’s Palme d’Or. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest won the Grand Prix and is based on the book by the late Martin Amis. It centres on the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess and his family, who live in a handsome house overlooking the camp. The film depicts the banality of evil as we see the Hoesses go about their everyday lives, seemingly oblivious to the background sounds of anguished screams and gunfire and smoke bellowing from a camp chimney. Although his religion is never mentioned in the film, Hoess was brought up as a strict Catholic in Baden-Baden. His father wanted him to become a priest, but Hoess joined the army instead. In a chilling scene he and some SS officers discuss, with clinical detachment, the most technically efficacious methods of mass extermination.

Abbé Pierre – A Century Of Devotion is a sweeping, old-fashioned biopic showcasing the inspirational but flawed French priest who devoted his long life to championing the poor and becoming the voice of the homeless, establishing the Emmaus movement. The film asks if he did enough to leave the world a better place.

Firebrand is a loosely historical retelling of the last months of King Henry VIII’s reign. Jude Law delivers a convincing performance as the tyrannical monarch. The Swedish actress Alicia Vikander plays the King’s sixth and final wife, Katherine Parr. The King’s key advisor in the film is the scheming self-serving Catholic Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, played with great gusto by Simon Russell Beale. Gardiner, who had previously attempted to negotiate the King’s “great matter” with the Pope, is suspicious of Katherine’s Lutheran beliefs and her radical sympathies in objecting to the Church’s use of Latin. He is even more wary of her friendship with the Calvinist preacher Anne Askew, whom he has ordered to be burnt at the stake. He convinces the King that his wife is plotting against him but is thwarted when the King inconveniently dies before Gardiner can dispense with the “firebrand”.

Jude Law once played the fictitious Pope Pius XIII in the TV series The Young Pope, but his real-life predecessor, Pope Pius IX, is portrayed in Marco Bellocchio’s excellent film Kidnapped. Unknown to his Jewish parents, Edgardo Mortara had been secretly baptised as a baby by the family’s Catholic maid in 1850s Bologna. She feared that he was dying of colic and wanted him to spare him from limbo. The baptism is the catalyst for the local inquisitor, and ultimately Pius IX himself (Paolo Pierobon), to snatch the child and raise him as a Catholic in the Vatican. In Bellocchio’s hands the Pope is an obstinate leader who refuses requests to return the child, despite his chief advisor Cardinal Antonelli pleading with him that the Vatican risks bankruptcy if the Rothschilds call in a loan.

We witness the pope’s vivid nightmare of a group of rabbis entering the papal chambers and forcibly circumcising him. In another lyrical scene, the young Edgardo removes the nails from the hands and feet of a crucifix, allowing Christ to climb down from the cross and exit the church. The Guardian hailed it as a classic and the film succeeds in powerfully touching the spiritual dimension of our existence. When we first see Edgardo as an adult, he has become a priest; the end titles inform us that he died, aged 90, in an Italian monastery.

The Ecumenical jury, led by the Venezuelan theologian Fr Nestor Briceno, successfully dodged a diplomatic landmine by overlooking Kidnapped and going for the safer option of awarding the Ecumenical Prize to Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, an uplifting film about a Toyko toilet cleaner. The jury described it as a masterpiece that “communicates a powerful human story of hope, beauty and transfiguration in everyday life”. Fr Briceno was commendably diplomatic about Kidnapped, saying only that it was “a very interesting film”. Ken Loach’s Newcastle-set Syrian refugee drama, The Old Oak, received a special Commendation.

The Ecumenical jury was housed in a Cannes convent for the duration of the festival, not far from the beautifully restored church of Notre Dame de Bon Voyage, situated 100m from the famous Palais red carpet and where Napoleon once spent a night over 200 years ago. The church currently has a wonderful exhibition of the posters of each Ecumenical Prize-winning film since 1974. Bonaparte once observed that “men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues”: a prescient pronouncement about the representation of Catholicism at this year’s remarkable festival.

Dr Frank Mannion is a film director and producer. His new film, Quintessentially Irish, will be released later this year.

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