Cannes 2026 – Day 4: the Hamaguchi theater, Travolta’s Palme, Farhadi by Adam Bessa…
Every day, the hot spot live from the 79th Cannes Film Festival.
Film of the day: Suddenly by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi (in competition)
We will think what we will of the new feature by the Japanese author of Senses or Drive My Car (here relocated to France), but after two hours he manages to wow us with a “feet” orgy in the garden of a Parisian EHPAD. Intertwined senile elderly people, in fact, find balance by rubbing their neighbors’ toes. To achieve this absolutely invigorating senior hedonism, it was necessary to integrate the logic of a film straddling Lelouch and Bourdieu where good feelings are coiled in an acute political awareness of the world. Because if capitalism segments forces by nature, the humanism praised by the director of the EHPAD in question (Virginie Efira switching from French to Japanese with disconcerting ease) intends on the contrary to abolish this gap which separates caregivers from patients.
This path will be possible for her thanks to her meeting with a Japanese director (Tao Okamoto). As in Drive My Cartheater serves as a catharsis. And it is first of all through representation that the thought of the story is developed and constructed. Suddenlycertainly haunted by death, clings to life with disarming sincerity. The film is a response to our warlike and deadly times, a cry launched in the face of defeatism. This praise of benevolence can be exhausting or even make us smile; it especially reminds us of our cynicism as a Cannes spectator. There is no doubt that the experience will be more profitable than that of the last Lelouch (Eventually) or Costa Gavras (The last breath) who on an identical theme sought in vain to stupidly sacralize the supposed solemnity of the last moments.
Carried by a rather fascinating sense of direction but a sluggish screenplay, Hamaguchi’s film digs, searches and finally brings together pieces of seemingly doomed existences. Nothing like an orgy to re-enchant it all! Just when we wanted to make fun, a pigeon dropping landed on Virginie Efira’s forehead. Did we dream of this film? Did we suffer it? Is it ridiculous or brilliant? All at once, perhaps.
Today’s Palme d’Or: John Travolta
And hop, one more honorary Palme d’Or! “Surprise”, this one, unlike the one given to Peter Jackson during the opening ceremony, and the one that Barbra Streisand will receive on closing night. The surprise Palme d’Or is becoming a real little Cannes tradition, after that of Tom Cruise in 2022 and that of Denzel Washington last year. No longer very surprised, then. John Travolta didn’t act astonished very well when Thierry Frémaux told him the news, and Didier Allouch arrived on stage with the present in his arms, just before the screening of the star’s very first film as director. pulp Fiction And Saturday Night Fever.
Travolta is a great actor, of course, a huge icon of cinema, no one will say otherwise, especially not after the totally electrifying montage of extracts from his films, which was shown to the audience at the Salle Debussy. And in staging, then, how does Travolta defend himself? Hmm… To avoid spoiling the party, we won’t dwell too much on Night flight to Los Angelesa 1 hour and 1 minute film that is astonishingly naive, in which the actor, a notorious aviation fan, remembers his very first plane trip, when he was little, one night in 1962.
A founding shock recounted in a sort of hypermnesic enumeration à la George Pérec, a Rome miniature and clumsy, where Travolta praises the beauty of the design of sixties jet planes and the magnificence of the meal trays that were served at that time to baby boomers in short pants. The film is traversed by a not very funny running gag about cordon bleu, which is a bit like the actor’s legendary lines about Big Macs. Night flight to Los Angeles is at pulp Fictionand the Palmes d’Or as a surprise honor to the real Palmes d’Or.
Video of the day: Adam Bessa for Side stories (in competition)
Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel and Pierre Niney are the stars ofSide stories. But the pillar of the film is undoubtedly Adam Bessa, revealed in 2024 in The Ghosts and which confirms here all the potential that we had glimpsed. The Franco-Tunisian actor tells us about this significant experience in his young career: working under the direction of the great Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi.
Today’s heroine: Nora in Viva (Critics Week)
Since her arrival at the head of La Semaine de la Critique in 2022, Ava Cahen has been able to shape selections that question the feminine, the masculine, and male-female relationships. Nora, the heroine of Vivathe first feature by Spanish director Aina Clotet, joins the gallery of complex female characters, fascinating because they are rich in contradictions, who have appeared on the big screen of the Miramar theater for 4 years. And rather on the top of the pile.
Played by the director, Aina, a biology researcher, reaches her forties thinking she has finally overcome the cancer that led to the removal of her right breast. Until a follow-up examination reveals a possible new tumor which he is expressly suggested to have analyzed. But Ana will refuse this exam. Prefer doubt to certainty. Eat up the life – personal and professional – that he has left in case it is brief.
She will thus experience a passion in the arms of a young lover 20 years her junior and will rebel against those who have surrounded her – her boyfriend, her mother, her father – who have become sources of oppression more or less unwillingly. And the tone of the film, constantly evolving between seriousness and zaniness (including a scene of love and… vomit which returns Ruben Östlund to the category of small players) follows his infinite quest for freedom. To life, to death.
Music of the day: the sounds of ROB for Sanguine (Midnight Session)
A thumping bass, contracting layers: Rob composed for Sanguine music that resonates like a pulse. Marion Le Corroller has indeed entrusted her first feature to the man who knows how to make synths bleed – Maniac, Revenge, The Legends Office – and the result… pulses.
It is not a score, rather a circulation, a trance. Rob’s electro literally embraces the subject of the film, this body horror where a young intern feels her body giving out under the pressure of hospital performance: the bass beats like a heart under monitoring, the layers contract like veins, the machine breathes in place of the characters who no longer have time to do anything.
Rob does what he does best, hijacking the Moroder/Tangerine Dream legacy and putting it under the scalpel. Except that here the pulsation takes on a political meaning. It is the numerical oppression of the duty roster, the tick-tock of a exhausted generation. And it is, at the same time, its reverse side: the party, the night, BPM as the last frontier, the place where beating again means living a little more. It’s ultimately less of a soundtrack than an electrocardiogram: cool, oozing, vital. And when the film stops, it still hits you in the temples.
Verbatim of the day: Yeon Sang-ho, the director of Colony (Midnight Session)
“As soon as we have a problem today, we ask it to an AI. She gives us a very clear answer, but this answer is never anything other than the expression of a collective conscience. However, what society needs most in 2026 is not a general, standardized response. These are minority voices, singular opinions, answers that cannot come out of the machine. Colony is a film which is concerned precisely with the disappearance of the individual in the mass. AI is the most visible symptom of this. But more generally, as soon as we become 4 or 5, as soon as we become a group, it is the death of individuality – and therefore of humanity. While preparing the film, I researched biological colonies. These organisms constantly produce mutants, individuals radically different from the group. And it is precisely thanks to them that the species survives. Biologically, the weird individual saves the group. Basically, my two heroines are mutants and my zombies are ChatGPT.“
Sentence of the day: “There are a lot of American films at Cannes this year” (Thierry Frémaux)
When starting the sympathetic session Club Kidby actor and director Jordan Firstman (photo below), one of the representatives of the US delegation to Un Certain Regard, Thierry Frémaux tried to short-circuit the refrain most heard this month in the cinema media (“Why are Americans avoiding the Cannes Film Festival?”), which seems to get him drunk nicely. They are there, the Ricans, the proof, today, with Club Kidbut also Tangsa black and white indie cartoon produced by Seth Rogen presented in a special screening, the first film directed by John Travolta to be seen on Apple TV at the end of May, and a documentary on John Lennon by Steven Soderbergh. There you go… And otherwise, when is Spielberg coming out?
Today in Cannes
The competition is heating up with three films presented this Saturday on the Croisette: Sheep in the Box by Hirokazu Kore-eda, The loved one by Rodrigo Sorogoyen and Paper Tiger by James Gray. Girl’s memory by Judith Godrèche will be screened at Un Certain Regard, Shana by Lila Pinell at the Filmmakers’ Fortnight and Fuel oil in the arteries by Pierre Le Gall at Critics’ Week. Night owls will end the day with Full PhilQuentin Dupieux with Kristen Stewart and Woody Harrelson, in Midnight Screening.
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