This year’s competition program at the Cannes Film Festival is full of familiar names, including Pedro Almodovar, James Gray, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Two international masters were organized at the beginning of the festival, promising an inspiring start to the annual battle for the Palme d’Or. Only one fulfilled that promise, and even that with few reservations.
Pawel Pawlikowski brings his strong but surprisingly good sense of creativity to the story of Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) in Frankfurt in 1949, where he is asked to attend an event in post-WWII Germany still seeking its identity. In the film’s beautiful one-shot opening scene, Mann’s son, Klaus (August Diehl), puts the next several themes on the phone with his sister, Erica (Sandra Huller). Now Thomas and Erica live in the States, but what does their return to Germany (after fleeing in 1933) mean for their family, reputation and country? Is Thomas Mann the “Good German,” and what room is there for civilization or intelligence in a truly desolate place? Since the West is run by Americans, as Klaus asks, do they choose Hitler or Mickey Mouse?
After the introduction, “Father’s Land” it is almost split in two as Erica, who works as her father’s assistant, travels with Thomas to two parts of Germany, starting in Frankfurt in the West and moving to Weimar in the East. The US largely controls the former, and the press conference on Mann’s arrival highlights some of the issues surrounding his visit. Is he a returning hero to the people who might say he betrayed them by running away in the first place? In a place that has seen all its programs destroyed to the point of being ruled by its former enemies on one side and the remnants of the Nazi party on the other, what role does a man who preaches the importance of Art have? Does culture matter to the conquered?
Collaborating again with the actor of “Ida” and “Underground War” Lukasz Zal, “Izwe Loba” has an artistic visual language, and finds songs that could hang in the galleries, but this drama feels more pleasant than others, a vision of a place without warmth. To add humanity to it, Pawlikowski plays a little with history and creates a family drama revealing that Klaus will not attend the event with his twins and his father because he killed himself after that prelude. Huller then becomes the gateway to the game: the perspective of a woman considering the cost of what a war they were not directly involved in has exacted on her family. The Oscar nominee for “Anatomy of a Fall” is a predictable star, making the best of every emotional beat. You are the only reason to see it.
“Fatherland” is surprisingly short, clocking in at about 80 minutes with the credits, and that gives it almost the feel of a short film that never found a way to stretch into a feature. I liked the way the Manns were almost interrogated in Frankfort but I was silenced by the choruses of reality praising their presence in a part of the country that isn’t too ready to ask tough questions, yet it feels like “Father’s Land” ends just as the film begins to entertain these themes. Perhaps it is intended to keep the audience in a kind of intellectual purgatory, showing two people grappling with the difficulties of not only their individual inheritance and family but the entire country.
There are no easy answers in “Fatherland,” which makes it less satisfying narratively, but I think it also means it will have more freedom to jump around in the minds of viewers than a film about solid endings.
Bouncing around is a good phrase to use to describe Asghar Farhadi’s biggest disappointment “Same Tales,” the first true heartbreaker of Cannes 2026. An amazing group of French living legends including Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Cassel, Virginie Efira, and Catherine Deneuve are unable to rescue the borderline text from Farhadi, which uses Krzysztof Kieslowski’s sixth chapter of Love “Deka” as the basis of the short film “Deka” a paradoxical story of crossed characters who live across from each other and another on the streets of Paris.
As the people at the center of “Parallel Tales” begin to disagree more and more, the mind wanders to the fact that this film about two brothers who make movies has a narrative basis that focuses on the act of cheating, where the filmmaker is released in 2022. Perhaps the most interesting reading of the first word in the title is how the accompanying story can be read as well as how the accompanying story can be read. Sadly, it’s a much more fun way to release a film than to do so directly.
Huppert plays a writer named Sylvie, whose niece Celine (Indian Hair) brings home a young man named Adam (Adam Bessa) to help her pack up her old house before they sell it. Adam meets Celine after stopping a pickpocket on the train, which makes her believe that she can trust him. Sylvie is a writer, and she has been spying on the beautiful people across the street, turning her views of their lives into fiction.
In Sylvie’s version, there are infidelities, double crosses, and even murder, but the truth is that these neighbors are much more ordinary than that. When Adam takes credit for Sylvie’s novel, and it ends up in the hands of the people who inspired it, the lines begin to blur, and the emotions beneath the fiction begin to show in reality.
Across from Sylvie is an apartment used as a sound studio by a filmmaker named Nicolas (Cassel, easily the film’s MVP), who works with his brother Theo (Pierre Niney) and a foley artist named Nita (Efira), Nicolas’ partner. They spend their days making fake noises for what look like natural images, which sound like comments on the reality of nothing, even the sound of a bird’s wings flapping in the film, but, like most of the text, it never really connects to anything.
Farhadi can never seem to find the right temperature on “Parallel Tales,” alternating between half-baked ideas that don’t quite resonate with their overcooked character beats. Frankly, these characters feel as real as Nita’s Foley work, making them all a device in an over-the-top storytelling segment.
You will bounce back; let’s hope Cannes will do the same soon.
