Teetering on a ledge overlooking the Ottauquechee River in Quechee, Vermont, sits the house of the famend glassware firm Simon Pearce. As you maneuver your method alongside the aisles, holding your breath to keep away from touching completely something, phrases spur into being: whimsical. Light. Reflective. Refractive. Crafted. And sure, additionally costly. We query how we’d work together with it. Will we dare decide it up? Will we marvel at how daylight goes by it? Are we “Blown Away?” Do we glance alongside it, round it, or by it, like an aquarium?
The official theme of the Cannes Movie Pageant is certainly “Aquarium,” from the Carnival of the Animals. It serenades expertise on the steps of the Grand Lumiere. It’s met with applause because the “Pageant de Cannes” emblem seems throughout the opening credit of every movie. For thus lengthy, I appeared into this aquarium from afar, holding my breath to keep away from touching completely something, attempting to see what life appeared like from afar. And this time, leaping into the oceanic enchantment of the movie pageant, I did my finest to outlive within the tank.
The home windows featured within the Cannes movies, whether or not the view of the ocean by a porthole in “Romeria,” the time-lapse marvel by a window in “Resurrection,” the angled and expansive home windows of “Splitsville,” the dusty windshields of “Sirat,” or the pueblo desert views in “Eddington,” current themselves as alternatives, not as mirrors. Even “Nouvelle Obscure,” a film about French “cinemaniacs” at Cannes that debuted for French cinemaniacs at Cannes, is extra of a window into the filmmaking course of than a mirrored image again. That is what occurs when artists head into the Cannes “sizzling store” with a novel thought, visible storytelling, and audio components. Add warmth, and magic occurs.
Glass itself will be sculpted. Or no less than, tried to. On the underside ground of Simon Pearce, one can view proper into the glass blowing course of, no window required. You’re enveloped by the warmth. Sand, lime, and warmth flip hundreds of thousands of items into glass.
The furnace of Cannes, too, shapes artists. The individuality of Cannes is the million totally different moments and experiences, like items of sand, that may flip right into a fragile, stunning factor that’s distinctive to you.
Through the 2025 Pierre Angénieux Tribute, Dion Beebe reminded us of the connection between sand and glass, perpetually becoming on this beachside pageant, sharing that he needed to thank “Pierre Angénieux for taking these grains of sand and creating extraordinary glass.”
“Sentimental Worth,” this yr’s Grand Prix winner, is equally constructed up of beautiful little moments, like items of sand. It sticks to you and stays with you, like sand and glass. In a primary take a look at “Sentimental Worth” shared by NEON, the undisputed current king of Palm d’Or winners, our fundamental character, Nora, makes an attempt to again away from a window, knocks a vase, after which miraculously saves it from its destiny of being smashed on the ground.
Within the Grand Lumiere, we collectively held our breath as that vase shook precariously on the desk and was ultimately retrieved, saved from its destiny. It’s a second that solidifies the entire themes in Sentimental Worth, nonetheless fleeting they’ll really feel for us at any given second: imaginative and prescient, household dynamics, recollections, locations, movement, and relationships. From the opening scenes that happen in a theater to a home properly lived in, “Sentimental Worth” facilities on breath and foundations, even when the breath is misplaced or the foundations are cracked. Each basis, regardless of whether it is splintered, centered, or classic, affords a novel viewpoint. The Cannes movies this yr are not any totally different.
Whether or not we’re swaying within the backside of boats (“Romeria”), compressed into small rooms and vans (“Love On Trial”), seeing vistas from pueblos (“Eddington”), tenting in automobiles within the desert (“Sirat”, or constructing a brand new life in a cabin in the midst of nowhere (“Die My Love”),
Cannes itself is a basis, nay, an establishment. It supplies, nay, invitations you to a window to view each scene as significant, such because the falling vase. Magnificence is present in each scene, such because the analysis sequence within the library for “Sentimental Worth.” Fingers thumb by data. A piano rating performs. Moments like that, seemingly small, might maintain sentimental worth to us.
A movie like “Sentimental Worth” might need been heavy-handed in one other pair of fingers. “Splitsville,” too, if taken on by a director not as dedicated to cinematic comedy as Michael Angelo Covino, might have been held wildly in another way and fewer efficiently. However right here, you may maintain the story in your fingers. We glance alongside it, round it, or by it. Cannes is the most important movie pageant on this planet, and but, not like Simon Pearce, it’s a stunning factor you may cup in your personal fingers like glass. Or a movie. In any case, as we’re reminded in Nouvelle Obscure, “enhancing is the place we maintain the previous, current, and future in our fingers.” A movie is created by warmth and imaginative and prescient. It goes into the oven in a technique, and comes out one other.
To ensure that us to be “Blown Away,” even by ourselves and our personal work, it needs to be uniquely yours. That could be a sentiment echoed by the panelists at The American Pavilion’s occasion on Brief movies. Your initiatives must be one thing private and a challenge that takes dangers.
However, glass is inevitable: it breaks. Characters bounce proper by it in a number of Cannes movies (names omitted to keep away from any spoilers or key moments). “Sirat” itself, like glass, is precarious. By all the movie, we’re by no means fairly certain the place it’d change or break or be shattered. And shatter you’ll. Whereas your nerves flip to glass, the movie loudly asks the place the tip of the world begins for you. At what level will you, or your eardrums, shatter? It’s a reminder that your life and every part in it are as fragile as glass. After which follows up questioning should you’re ready with your personal grounding methods.
And in the midst of that have, by some means, think about the Grand Lumiere’s lights spontaneously come on, smacking your already shocked system. Prompted by an influence outage that took out the remainder of the realm, we glance round at everybody’s equally illuminated, shocked faces, once more trying to discover our breath. Our personal fragility, and I assume town’s confirmed in a single second.
Are we so fragile that we are able to fall? Maybe, just like the poster of “Eddington,” careening off the cliff in pursuit of a false conspiracy? Is “Eddington” a mirror, a magnifying glass, a kaleidoscope, or a distorted filter? Maybe it’s a cut up diopter, lovingly and creatively deployed in Bi Gan’s cinematic reflection dream “Resurrection,” decided to maintain two issues in focus on the similar time, however within the case of Eddington, failing to come back to a grand conclusion. The artifacts of the 2020 lockdown, dutifully recrafted in Eddington right down to the hoarding of bathroom paper and dinners to go, briefly (although maybe for too lengthy) place us again in that precarious time. It reminded us of our personal fragility (and sure, watching Eddington whereas a number of within the viewers coughed away was a novel expertise).
All through the pageant, it’s unclear which a part of you’ll break or shatter first. Will it’s your sleep schedule? Your eardrums on the Agnes Varda, the place the combination on “Die My Love” was so loud, it pulsated by you and the ground (satirically, in a purpose I’m not right here to spoil, it’s becoming that I noticed “Resurrection” there too).
After which, in a comforting method, you notice that it doesn’t matter. Even should you broke someplace, had some sort of blemish, there are nonetheless, after all, Seconds: Simon Pearce’s second line of “nonetheless handmade,” “nonetheless totally purposeful,” and nonetheless “distinctly Simon Pearce” glass. Uniquely yours.
The mark of director, I believe, is whether or not we are able to establish and inform that their mark is left on the movie. You don’t must benefit from the product or agree with the alternatives, however should you can respect the distinctive viewpoint, then the director has completed their job.
Within the glass artwork world, there are these recognizable by title and product, like Chihuly glass. Or Simon Pearce. They’re identified for making one thing uniquely theirs and instantly identifiable.
Cannes dares you to do the identical. With care. And with your personal fingers.
