By Thomas Page, CNN
Cannes, France (CNN) — Ari Aster is currently living in a state of blissful ignorance. It won’t last long.
The director of “Midsommar” and “Beau Is Afraid,” who has brought his politically volatile work “Eddington” to the Cannes Film Festival, admits he hasn’t seen any of the online reactions to his movie.
“I’ve been very deliberately avoiding the discourse about the film,” he told CNN during a packed and often impassioned press conference at the festival on Saturday. “I’ll probably dip my head into the swamp and see what the f***’s going on in there, or something, but I haven’t done it yet.”
“Eddington,” starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone and Austin Bulter, is set in small-town New Mexico during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Phoenix’s sheriff is baffled by mask policies and the apparent hysteria among the townspeople, while Pascal’s mayor is toeing the line (while also making dubious business deals with big tech to build a data center on the town’s outskirts). Their contretemps predates the pandemic, rooted in their relationships with the sheriff’s wife, an aloof, clearly depressed Emma Stone.
The small-town drama is pulled wider by news events, namely the death of George Floyd and the protests movement that followed. Aster shoehorns all manner of hot-button topics: identity politics, social media silos, false flag attacks, and the allure of conspiracy theories, all facilitated by the wholesale erosion of truth in the digital age.
The film is proving a potent Rorschach test. Less than 24 hours after it premiered, there’s already plenty of online chatter about where “Eddington’s” own politics stand, with commentators of all stripes – some sight unseen – making the case it speaks for them.
“I wanted to paint a picture of the society that we’re now living in,” said Aster. “And I didn’t want to attach myself to one ideology or one story or one belief system, because it’s too narrow. That’s not the point, y’know? The film is designed to be ambiguous in certain ways.”
“What the film is about, for me, is about what happens when people who are so isolated and are living in their own realities – what happens when they come into conflict with each other,” Aster explained. “When you start bumping up against each other, a new logic is created, and out of that, people start amplifying each other’s fears.”
Earlier at the press conference, the director discussed how the project began.
“I wrote this film in a state of fear and anxiety about the world,” he said. “I wanted to try and pull back and just describe and show what it feels like to live in a world where nobody can agree on what is real anymore.”
“I feel over the last 20 years we’ve fallen into this age of hyper-individualism … that social force that used to be kind of central to liberal mass democracies – which is an agreed upon version of the world – that is gone now,” he added.
“Covid felt like the moment where that length was finally cut for good,” Aster said. “I wanted to make a film about just what America feels like to me and what it felt like to me at that time.”
Journalists pressed the actors and director more than once on the current state of America. One questioned if actors had fears of reprisals for making movies with political messages.
“Fear is the way that they win,” said Pascal. “So keep telling the stories, keep expressing yourself, and keep fighting to be who you are. And f—k the people that try to make you scared, y’know? And fight back. This is the perfect way to do so, in telling stories. And don’t let them win.”
Pascal, answering another question about Latin American migrants, recounted his youth:“My parents are refugees for Chile. I myself was a refugee. We fled a dictatorship. And I was privileged enough to grow up in the US after asylum in Denmark. And if it weren’t for that, I don’t know what would have happened to us. And so I stand by those protections,always.”
Another journalist went as far as to ask if there was “nothing left but civil war waiting for America.”
“I don’t speak English,” Aster quipped, before eventually answering. “I think we’re on a dangerous road, and I feel like we’re living through an experiment that is going wrong – it’s gone wrong. It’s not going well and it feels like there’s no way out of it … (It) should probably be stopped or paused because it’s not working, but it’s clear that nobody’s actually interested in stopping it.”
Cannes is no stranger to mixing art of politics. The seminal 1968 edition featured protests spearheaded by director Jean-Luc Goddard, which forced the festival to shut down. (Time proved kind to Goddard of course, who will be venerated once more at Cannes this year with Richard Linklaker’s “Nouvelle Vague,” which retraces the new wave director’s efforts to get 1960 film “À Bout de Souffle” made.)
The 78th edition, the first since President Donald Trump’s return to office, has already, and perhaps inevitably, kept one eye on the news. On the opening night, Robert De Niro, receiving an honorary Palme d’Or, hit out Trump, labelling him a “philistine president.”
“In my country, we are fighting like hell for the democracy we once took for granted,” he told an audience made up of the great and good of the international film community.
The Cannes Film Festival runs until May 24.
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