Meanwhile, in Cannes… Denzel Washington crowned, Julia Ducournau attempts a double, the Kevin Spacey controversy

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CANNES REcap , DAY SEVEN. Politics continues to dominate this 78th edition, and as the competition progresses, we attempt a mid-term prize list.

The 2025 edition of the Cannes Film Festival is decidedly very political. After the anti-Trump speeches of Robert De Niro and Pedro Pascal, the displayed and repeated support for Gaza and Ukraine, it was on the case of Egypt that the spotlight was focused on Monday. Director Tarik Saleh delivered a new attack on Egyptian President Al-Sissi in "Eagles of the Republic" . With this new incendiary film peppered with humor, the 53-year-old director closes the political-religious triptych that made his international success and was initiated in 2017 with "Cairo Confidential" .

This Tuesday, May 20, it was the turn of Iranian Jafar Panahi to take the podium. The multi-award-winning director, who was imprisoned in his country for seven months in 2022-2023 under this sentence, was able to leave Tehran with his team to go to Cannes, where he will present "A Simple Accident" . Nothing has filtered through about this feature film in the running for the Palme d'Or. All we know is that the film, which did not benefit from Iranian funding, was shot "clandestinely" . Jafar Panahi recovered the passport that had been confiscated from him in 2010 in the spring and was able to leave Tehran without incident. He had then come to France to finish "A Simple Accident" .

Honorary Palme d'Honneur for Denzel Washington

Who knew? On the steps, the team from Spike Lee's "Highest 2 Lowest" put on a show with the director in a striped suit, round glasses, and orange and blue hat, and rap star A$AP Rocky - the city's Mr. Rihanna. Just before the out-of-competition screening of the film, Denzel Washington ("Malcolm X," "Glory," "Philadelphia") was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the American director and festival directors Iris Knobloch and Thierry Frémaux. The everyday men portrayed by the actor in Harlem certainly emancipated the image of African Americans in the United States and around the world. But we will never remember him any differently than during that interview at the Bristol - was it for "Hurricane"? - where, shaking with laughter, he watched us in front of a tape recorder that... wasn't working. And above all, did nothing to help us.

Ducournau attempts a double

With "Alpha" , his new film - a usual body horror as divisive as usual? - Julia Ducournau plunges a 13-year-old teenager (Melissa Boros) into an unspecified country and a period, the 80s, where an epidemic evoking AIDS is raging. Double temporality, desaturated image, the 41-year-old filmmaker intends to observe the way in which traumas travel from generation to generation. This fan of David Cronenberg - "it's a reference that I've been digesting for twenty-five years, " she explains , "he speaks to me deep down. I always had the impression that he was telling me the truth" - is playing big ( "Titane" , already earned her a Palme d'Or at Cannes"). Will "Alpha" allow her or not to win the second one, sending her to join the very closed club of double-award-winning directors, among whom Haneke, Loach or the Dardennes?

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Portrait 10 things to know about Julia Ducournau, in the running for a second Palme d'Or at Cannes

Let's be clear: in the midst of the competition, nothing is decided. Fourteen films have already been presented, with a dozen or so remaining to be discovered. Despite everything, trends are emerging, and some names are coming up repeatedly. Here, with a perfectly assumed subjectiveness, is our mid-term assessment:

• Palme d’Or : “The Secret Agent”, by Kleber Mendonça Filho
• Grand Prize : “Eddington”, by Ari Aster
• Best Director Award : “Sirat” by Oliver Laxe
• Best Actress Award : Nadia Melliti da, in “The Last One” by Hafsia Herzi
• Best Actor Award : Aleksandr Kuznetsov and Aleksandr Filippenko in "Two Prosecutors" by Sergei Loznitsa

His presence is not unanimous. American actor Kevin Spacey, Oscar winner for "American Beauty" and "Usual Suspects," is expected to receive a lifetime achievement award on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival this Tuesday, the Better World Fund, which is independent of the event and awards the prize, told AFP. Acquitted of sexual assault charges in Britain and the United States, Kevin Spacey will be honored "for his decades of artistic genius" at a charity gala, according to the foundation. The foundation told AFP it invited the actor because he was "cleared by the courts." The actor has not set foot on the Croisette since 2016.

In July 2023, after a month-long, high-profile trial in London, Kevin Spacey was acquitted of sexual assault charges brought against him by four men. One of them is also suing the actor in a civil suit, which means he faces a new trial. Also accused of sexual assault in the United States, Kevin Spacey was found not guilty in 2022 by a New York civil court. And in 2019, the charges were dropped in a separate case. However, the actor was the subject of new proceedings this year for sexual assault in London, filed by a former actor, Ruari Cannon. In a documentary broadcast in May 2024 on Channel 4 and called "Spacey Unmasked," Ruari Cannon accused Kevin Spacey of touching him inappropriately in public in 2013 in London when he was 21 and the American actor was 53.

Given the career of Hubert Charuel, director of the acclaimed "Petit Paysan" in 2017, presenting his second film at Un Certain Regard is the ideal opportunity. Not only is this respected but more discreet selection ideal for a return to business after such a long absence (eight years all the same since the filmmaker had given any news), but it has always shown itself to be fond of early works - shot at the age of 39, "Météors" , even a little late, undoubtedly belongs to this category.

Set in the filmmaker's native Haute-Marne, a decidedly essential part of current French cinema (part of "Dossier 137" , presented a few days ago in official competition, is also set in the department's capital, Saint Dizier), "Météors" tells the story of the wanderings of two precarious friends in this rapidly growing gray area, halfway between the old-fashioned working-class world and the hard-core lumpenproletariat. A salesman at Burger King, Mika is the action man of the tandem he forms with Daniel, who is responsible for thinking up their opportunities for quick money and sharpening the contours of a joint project that seems like an Arlesian - setting up a kennel for abandoned dogs on the island of Réunion.

Charuel adjusts to the uncertain schedule of his characters as he did with the young breeder in "Petit paysan" : hence this falsely disjointed rhythm, alternating downtimes and bouts of stress that punctuate the hiccupy days of the two friends, themselves bearers of radically opposed energies. Mika, the operational one, is paradoxically very soft on the surface (Paul Kircher, French cinema's favorite post-adolescent, king of the half-closed glance and the sleepwalking gait) while Dan (Idir Azougli, excellent as a pathetic and immature rebel), a professional slacker who is diagnosed with serious cirrhosis, spends the entire film gesticulating.

More than a tempo, this skillfully calculated asymmetry gives the film its physical structure: the material urgency is never without a halo of reverie, of puffs of worry, so many vaporous flows which float in the cosmos of Saint Dizier, a city so dark, so silent, that it sometimes seems less dormant than literally dead, in a state of decomposition.

This bet on torpor, a stark contrast to the nervous chronicles of precariousness by Loach or the Dardennes, pays off here. Rather than yet another thriller set in peripheral France, "Meteors" flows into a narrative of wandering dear to film noir, with Mika in the role of the private investigator ( "I'm super good at investigations," he likes to repeat) and Saint Dizier as the LA of the East, a horizontal, porous city where evil nests almost everywhere, in the employers' casual interpretation of the rights of the working poor and in the surrounding basements where the same destitute pile up Europe's nuclear waste, a cancer that eats away at the city in the shadows and silence. Only a femme fatale is missing. Although Daniel, with his impossible dreams, his subversive impulses and his tragic nature, is one in his own way.

A beautiful end to the Nesspresso beach parties. To make a lasting impression, Eva Longoria was named mistress of ceremonies for this Mexican-themed nighttime fiesta. The "Desperate Housewives" star offered her Casa Del Sol tequila to enhance the caffeinated flavors. For dinner, the ultra-talented Mory Sacko, ex- "Top Chef" and now Michelin-starred chef at his Parisian restaurant Mosuke, was in charge. Featuring fried chicken and plantain with bulldozer sauce, chicken with mafé, and the best French fries we've ever eaten in our lives. As for music, Marisol and Carla Mo played one groovy hit after another and had guests dancing the night away, from footballers Paul Pogba and Adil Rami to rappers Black M and Tiakola and actress Virginie Efira.

The singer tells us how a splendid corset designed exclusively for him by John Galliano took his breath away before he could even climb the steps of the Palais de Festival.