IN MEASURED PRAISE OF KAWASE NAOMI
It is undeniable that the Festival de Cannes, and its artistic director Thierry Fremaux, wields a considerable amount of power in the global film world. If this were not the case, no one would care that Fremaux seems to have a personal investment in certain mediocre filmmakers, such as Paolo Sorrentino, Michel Franco, and Kornel Mundruczo. But because of the international spotlight that Cannes shines on these directors and their work, due diligence demands that we reckon with these minor talents on a semi-regular basis. A kind of resentment builds up, and critics begin to take it as a personal affront.
When cooler heads prevail, we can recognize that it’s a flaw in the system, an unjustified elevation of one person’s taste, or the whims of a small group of sales agents—factors well beyond the ken of meritocracy, in other words—that create such a situation. A tiny cabal’s idiosyncrasy becomes the dominant agenda, like it or not. You can simply look at Cannes’ recent history to see that we are dealing with inscrutable “gut decisions.” Did anyone honestly believe Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour (2015) was somehow unfit for Competition? Were all 55 of 2014’s official selections really better than Christian Petzold’s Phoenix? What to make of the fact that Claire Denis has not had a film in Competition since Chocolat (1988)? One could go on and on.
All of this leads us to the strange case of Japanese auteur Kawase Naomi. A Cannes regular since her debut feature won the Camera d’Or in 1997, Kawase has become a lightning rod for everything that is wrong with Cannes in the Fremaux era. She is viewed as one of the festival’s pets, someone whose career, to all intents and purposes, has been built by the festival itself. More troubling, it seems that a simple majority of English-language critics consider Kawase’s films to be utterly undistinguished, if not actively bad.
