Hamaguchi signs Cannes 2026's first masterpiece

Special correspondent to the Cannes Film FestivalWhat a brave and exciting film has been directed by Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Soudain, which premiered this Friday in the official competition of the Cannes Film Festival, has the audacity to take all the time and words it needs to reflect on a theme as uncinematic as the care of people with neurological diseases, and it does so through a beautiful story of friendship between two women, the director of a nursing home in Paris who introduces a new humanitarian philosophy at the center (Virginie Efira) and a Japanese theater director with terminal breast cancer (Tao Okamoto).

Hamaguchi, the director who loves words the most and best films dialogues in current cinema, trusts in the power of cinema as a dialectical art to the point of dedicating a monologue of more than ten minutes to explain quite clearly the structural collapse of capitalism –with graphs included–, but this is a film of conversations that last for hours and in which, basically, two women try to answer the question “Who are you”. A masterful film of simple and profound humanism and, of course, the first major favorite for the Palme d'Or at this edition.

It should be noted that Soudain is not a didactic film, in the sense that it does not chew ideas to facilitate their digestion, but it does not disguise them with false complexity either. Above all, it is a film about the importance of taking care of each other, but honest enough to address the economic and social factors that make it difficult. Hamaguchi is inspired by the letters exchanged by the philosopher Makiko Miyano and the medical anthropologist Maho Isono, material that the Japanese director transfers to fiction, imagining this late but intense and defining friendship between the characters of Efira and Okamoto, who do a remarkable interpretive job: one learned Japanese and the other French, languages they alternate naturally throughout the film.

The prominence of theater in the plot –through the experimental play that the playwright performs in Paris and which has made the encounter of the two protagonists possible– and the more than three hours of duration connect Soudain with another torrential film by Hamaguchi, the Oscar-winning Drive my car, but the Japanese filmmaker's new film is much more luminous and open to the world, and profoundly political in its demand for more humane treatment of the sick that respects the dignity and integrity of people. Furthermore, it integrates all its reflections organically into the main story of the protagonists, thus recovering the almost lost possibility of intellectual cinema that thinks about our world without sacrificing the beauty and emotion of being alive.

Monsters under the rug

This Friday, three of the actresses who, like Victoria Luengo, are double-booked in this edition's Cannes competition coincide. On one hand, Virginie Efira – who also acted in Histoires parallèles by Asghar Farhadi – and, on the other, Catherine Deneuve and Léa Seydoux, who is the great protagonist of Gentle monster, where Austrian director Marie Kreutzer stages a family drama based on the premise that, deep down, we can trust no one. That's what Lucy (Seydoux) thinks, a pianist specialized in deconstructing pop classics, when the police confiscate her Austrian husband's computers one fine day for possession of child pornography, so she packs her bags and leaves with the young son they have in common.

After reimagining historical cinema in The Rebel Empress (Corsage), her notable approach to the figure of Elisabeth of Austria, Kreutzer now presents a family horror story that basically functions as a warning about the horror that people who appear to be perfectly integrated into society can hide. It is understandable that the topic concerns Austria, which has produced monsters like Josef Fritzl and is a culture prone to hiding miseries under the rug (or in the basements, as Ulrich Seidl's documentary pointed out). But Kreutzer's treatment tends towards the alarmism of made-for-TV movies, and the parallelism between Seydoux's character (magnificent, as usual) and the police investigating the case feels a bit forced.

Honorary Palme d'Or for Travolta

It wasn't announced, but it's hard to call the honorary Palme d'Or that John Travolta received this Friday from Thierry Fremaux, the festival director, a surprise. He never misses an opportunity to bestow one of these awards upon the Hollywood legends who grace Cannes. "For me, this is bigger than an Oscar," said a grateful Travolta, who cited two Palme d'Or winners, Marcel Camus's Black Orpheus and Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman, as very important films to him.

Travolta has good taste, not just as an actor but as a director too: Propeller one-way night coach, the feature he directed based on the children's book he published himself in 1997, is a small film in ambition and length – only 61 minutes – but with a lot of charm. It captures the fascination with commercial aviation from an era (the 1960s) when flying was still considered a luxury within reach of a few. Travolta portrays this world with nostalgia and tenderness through the eyes of Jeff, a boy fascinated by airplanes who flies to Los Angeles with his mother, who is seeking new professional and romantic opportunities (not necessarily in that order).

Evidently, the story is autobiographical and Jeff is the alter ego of Travolta himself, who makes a small cameo at the end as the pilot of a Boeing 707 (the actor's great passion). The actor's two sisters and one of his daughters, Ella Bleu Travolta, also act, because Propeller one-way night coach is above all a family affair, but with a Wes Anderson-esque aesthetic and a sense of humor that redeem it from being a mere monument to a Hollywood star's vanity.