“Cannes 2021: Indiana Jones and the Future of Cinema at Film Festivals”

There are few better places to experience the past, present and future of cinema more compactly than film festivals. The cinema has always been a nostalgic place, best understood in terms of the past and ideally creating new ways of seeing and telling from the traditions. This is particularly true of Cannes, France’s second cinema capital, where cinephilia is so pronounced that the boundaries between art and entertainment, between auteur cinema and craftsmanship have always been more permeable than in other film cultures.

Film festivals as the patron saint of cinema

And this is particularly true in Cannes in the post-pandemic period, in which the festivals, also for the sake of their own justification, have taken over the patronage of cinema, so to speak. Film festivals, as Cannes boss Thierry Frémaux has repeatedly emphasized in recent years, are cinema’s last bastion against streamers.

In Cannes, attempts were recently made to turn back time in order to be able to look further ahead. This year, the young Catherine Deneuve can be seen on the official festival poster, a scene from “La Chamade” by the now 91-year-old Alain Cavalier. That’s a tradition here. Every year, the poster motifs adorn the beach promenade along the Côte d’Azur. The festival reassures itself in history, while official partner TikTok presents a mobile film competition for the second time this year.

And then, on Thursday evening, 80-year-old Harrison Ford walked the red carpet. He has brought his hat and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who is more than half his age, who plays the heroic archaeologist’s goddaughter in retirement age: the past and future of one of the most popular franchises in cinema history, so to speak.

“Indiana Jones and the Wheel of Destiny” lands in Cannes at a point in time that is almost metaphorical. In Hollywood today, the studios rule with the most valuable IPs: “Intellectual Properties” such as Star Wars, Marvel or Indiana Jones, the rights to which all belong to Disney. Brands are a license to print money, you just have to keep the material fresh – while the owners, who have paid billions for it, would like to stop time.

The fifth “Indiana Jones” is almost symbolic of this form of retromania. America has just landed on the moon; and a bunch of old Nazis, led by Mads Mikkelsen, are chasing the Antikythera Mechanism, thought to have been designed by Archimedes, in the Old World in order to travel back to 1939 and still win World War II. Does that sound crazy?

Back to the Future

It is. But probably this dusty material, which was already inspired by “Adventure Serials” from the 1940s, can only be transferred to the present (or the future?) in a reasonably meaningful way. The grumpy Ford, who lamented after “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (which also screened in Cannes), that the theme tunes of “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” would accompany him to his grave, now has that too biological age of a grumpy, aging movie hero.

Of course, a film review of Indiana Jones and the Wheel of Destiny makes about as much sense as reviewing a ride on the Indiana Jones roller coaster at Disneyland Paris (the exploitation chain is another advantage of intellectual property). One also wonders why it took four screenwriters for this story. The old entertainment industry mantra “You shouldn’t be boring” applies, which director James Mangold manages surprisingly well over long stretches of the two and a half hours. In any case, significantly better than Steven Spielberg in the predecessor.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge appears to have been cast primarily to bring some “fleabag” energy to the geriatric growler. Her character, Helen, is drawn within these parameters, a mixture of heartfelt misanthropy and self-serving sarcasm. “That’s capitalism,” she says of her thieving sprees, which bring everyone involved together for the first showdown in a luxury hotel in Tangier.

Only the Lidibo of her Fleabag character was dimmed a bit due to Disney. There is no “hot priest” in Indiana Jones; only once does she cast an appreciative glance at a Greek sailor on board the ship of the deep-sea diver Renaldo, played by Antonio Banderas.

The fact that even Cannes are now willingly incorporating the retro madness of the US studios into world cinema, which is actually celebrated on the Croisette, reveals something about the situation of the festival – and of cinema. Last year, Tom Cruise stopped by with “Top Gun: Maverick”, the film then broke all post-pendemic box office records.

The same is likely to happen with Indiana Jones and the Wheel of Destiny, which further fuels the 80s nostalgia rampant in Hollywood. Mangold manages to bridge the gap between the old-fashioned original films (Nazis! der Hut! a teenage sidekick in Ethann Isidore!) and breathless action blockbusters like Mission Impossible.

And somewhere he should also awaken hope for a reinvention of the character, maybe even in the form of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who, as co-author of “No Time to Die”, freed the Bond franchise from its heavy male scent. “Indiana Jones and the Wheel of Destiny” turns the wheel of time back more than any Hollywood blockbuster before it – to the era of, that much can be said, Archimedes. From here, the cinema can only go in one direction: towards the future.