Can a simple entertainment film that had been in the drawer for two years literally stop a festival? If this film is called Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise may have it and the festival itself will program the less media-friendly films of the competition that day. THE blockbuster in question is at Cannes out of competition, but it is the title that has made the most promotional noise – on the Croisette there are giant posters, an LED screen with images of Cruise, the actor who occupied the second largest room in the Palace for a meeting with the public. Audience-friendly hysteria Cannes which always glorifies Hollywood heroes, as George Clooney and Brad Pitt often do. This year, Tom Hanks, producer and actor in Elvisby Baz Luhrman.
Coinciding with the Cannes preview of this sequel, the festival paid tribute to Tom Cruise, who in the words of festival director Thierry Frémaux “is an actor who has always had good taste in his choices. Cruise is a big movie star, someone who made an effort to get mainstream audiences back to movies. To see a movie with Cruise, you really have to go to the cinema. He is a filmmaker and it is a pleasure to have him in Cannes. For us it is very important to have Top Gun: Maverick“.
Cruise, by the way, had been absent from the festival since the failed distant horizon (1992), by Ron Howard. It’s actually a great comeback, a happy way for Paramount to launch a bulldozer it might bring the crowds back to theaters, even though it’s a sequel to a 1986 film.
Here on the Croisette, there was even a rumor that the studio was investing a fortune in a media night with Tom Cruise on the beach. In fact, the promotional party simply didn’t happen because there was a real commitment from the actor: his attendance at a London celebration of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. There was no party but there was an arrival at photo call from the Palace terrace by helicopter. Tom Cruise knows and loves this superstar firework display and also unleashed the madness on stage in front of the photographers.
Worse still, it was on the Croisette and in the streets around the steps of the palace – everything stopped, crowds in the sun without any distance (in the streets of the city, no one has a mask and very few people use it in the corridors, even under the strong recommendation of the organization). Pandemonium recalling the tumult of Brad Pitt’s last visit to Cannes…
But out of competition or not, is Joseph Kosinski’s Cannes film material? It may be the fierce audacity of the programmers, but the festival must ally itself with the greatest majors Hollywood, especially at a time when relations with Netflix are broken (the streaming giant cannot put films in competition and refuses to give them outside…).
Always that resurrected best gun it is extremely resourceful as a total show machine. Sensory entertainment that is a manifesto of high-end technical belief in the efficiency of building a colossal entertainment edifice. More than seeing planes fly by and watching naked men playing soccer on the beach, the return of the pilot in sunglasses continues to take your breath away. This time, more than in 1986, this notion of vertigo is fundamental, put into practice by betting on IMAX cameras installed in real US Navy fighter planes. The dizzying speed of G engines is seen not as a technological skill, but above all as the repetition of a logic of narration in aerial combat scenes.
The story shows us how the Maverick (Cruise) pilot hasn’t aged since 1986, although he no longer has his girlfriend Charlie (Kelly McGillis, an actress who retired from the circuit) and he has never been on the ranking military.
Now he’s called to the same school he graduated from, the place in California where the best of the best ride. He is called by Ice Man (Val Kilmer in a cameo Special) to lead young pilots on a mission to bomb an “enemy” nation’s uranium. According to the admirals, a “suicide mission”. Upon his return, Maverick resumes riding his motorcycle on the track with matching goggles and an ’80s jacket, though there’s one catch: he has to deal with his dead friend’s son, Goose. Rooster (Miles Teller) never understood his father’s death and blames Maverick for what happened. As if that weren’t enough, there is also an ex-girlfriend, Penny (Jennifer Connelly), precisely the great love of his life.
But Top Gun: Maverick it hardly needs a plot, it lives from a particular enchantment of a concept on the values of nostalgia. In truth, Joseph Kosinski, a filmmaker who was virtually in Lisbon last weekend in a promotional action in the form of a hologram, reasonably knows how to relive the past of this cadet school. Of good will, we are in the presence of a vibrant ceremony celebrating the nostalgia of a cinema of the 1980s, full of slow motionstylized photographs and songs in the soundtrack – we don’t have the Berlin ballads, but there is Lady Gaga.
Gala assumed with a nostalgia that also lets in the millennials: the achievement of Kosinski copy paste from the previous film; update it and celebrate it. At the end, there is a written mention: “in memory of Tony Scott”, the director of the original. The rest is the charisma of Tom Cruise, enough to minimize certain imperialistic tendencies of the argument and the undignified way in the construction of the female characters.
the Russian case
In the competition, the day when best gun all muffled, the biggest highlight was for Tchaikovsky’s wife, by Kirill Serebrennikov, the Russian film accused of being financed by Roman Abramovich and which many wanted to see canceled. A huge disappointment made by a dissident filmmaker who seems to be undecided between the academic product and the deconstruction of the processes of a biography, in this case the story of the unconsummated marriage between the composer Piotr Tchaikovsky and a young admirer who never accepted the divorce. , even realizing that the musician preferred men.
Overlong and with a stylization that mingles with luxury bourgeois advertising, this new work from the St. Petersburg filmmaker has an opulence that belies a story that attempts to address issues of sexual intimacy. It’s one of those cases where the excess of staging even becomes unbearable, which shows that all these sequence shots are pure technical vanity. Towards the end, he even slips into a theatrical performance that ends up in the language trap of the wealthy music video.
Not even Tchaikovsky’s music can redeem this disaster, especially since there is sometimes a contemporary sound for mere provocation. Or rather, on a whim. After the fall of the previous Petrov flu, Serebrennikov, a filmmaker who once had trouble with Putin’s regime, sinks even deeper.
And of course, being a Russian movie, its red carpet had almost no photographers. It was sad, especially because only the artistic entourage was invited. The Palais de Cannes does not even register the figures linked to official Russian entities. Today, at the official stands of the festival, only badges of support for Ukraine were distributed, one of which said Putin with a veto sign in the colors of Ukraine. Even with Tchaikovsky’s wife in competition, Cannes is really a festival that has chosen sides in this conflict…
dnot@dn.pt