Cannes: Four opening films, ranked.

by Elisa Giudici

IN WAVES

With Cannes now in full swing, let's rank the four opening titles from Un Certain Regard, Director's Fortnight, Critics Week, and Out of Competition.

4. In Waves by Phuong Mai Nguyen (France/Belgium) [Opening Film of Critics’ Week]
In Waves is probably the most polished and emotionally accessible of the festival's four openers, which, for my taste, also makes it the least exciting. The film follows AJ, a shy teenager obsessed with sketching and skating, whose world gradually expands after he becomes close to Kristen, the older sister of his best friend. Through her, AJ discovers surfing, which the film treats less as a sport than as a way of existing inside the world: a physical and emotional state where identity briefly feels stable, harmonious, almost suspended outside ordinary life...

What gives the film its personality is precisely this relationship with surfing culture and its roots. Nguyen repeatedly reconnects surfing to its Hawaiian and Indigenous origins, framing the ocean as something spiritual than simply aesthetic. The best passages are the quietest ones: AJ and Kristen floating on the water, the sensation that these characters are trying to hold onto fleeting moments of peace before adulthood and illness inevitably reshape everything.

The emotional trajectory itself is fairly classical. As AJ begins imagining a future connected to art and self-expression, Kristen is instead pulled into a long and painful confrontation with illness that changes the dynamic between them. The film is clearly rooted in autobiographical pain, and you can feel the sincerity behind every scene. Its emotional involvement never feels manipulative or cynical.

At the same time, In Waves struggles to transform that personal sincerity into something more formally or narratively distinctive. The animation is pleasant and occasionally beautiful, especially in the surfing sequences, but the storytelling itself remains surprisingly cautious. Even its most painful moments arrive softened by a certain narrative gentleness.

That’s ultimately why the film left me a little colder than the other opening titles. Not because it’s worse (in many ways it’s cleaner and more coherent) but because it rarely risks failure. Compared to the messier, more ambitious films surrounding it at Cannes, In Waves often feels content staying inside recognizable emotional territory rather than pushing toward something stranger or more unsettling. And personally, I’ll almost always remember the flawed films that reach too far more vividly than the graceful ones that never really lose control.

BUTTERFLY JAM

3. Butterfly Jam by Kantemir Balagov   [Opening Film of Directors’ Fortnight]
I didn’t hate Butterfly Jam the way many people around me seemed to. In fact, part of me admires it precisely because of how unstable and self-destructive it becomes. Balagov, who first came to fame with the Russian film Beanpole, returns with a film that's overflowing with ideas (too many ideas, probably). While not everything works, I still find that more compelling than watching something technically successful built entirely out of familiar material.

Butterfly Jam follows a young Circassian wrestler (Barry Keoghan) growing up in New Jersey beneath the impossible shadow of his father, a charismatic yet problematic diner cook who has become a kind of local legend within the community. He makes extraordinary Circassian flatbread, bizarre homemade jams out of practically anything (including butterflies, hence the title) and embodies a very specific ideal of masculine charisma and success that his son feels pressured to inherit. The boy dreams of reaching the Olympics, carrying not only personal ambition but the symbolic weight of representing a small diasporic community that rarely sees itself reflected anywhere.

What emerges is less a sports drama than a film about masculinity as collective performance. The men here are not villains, and Balagov never treats them as such. Instead, he captures something much more uncomfortable: the constant tension running underneath male camaraderie in tightly knit communities, where identity, pride, physical strength, and social status all feel frighteningly fragile. In the film’s best moments, you can sense how quickly affection, admiration, or joking intimacy can mutate into humiliation and violence the second someone’s self-image starts cracking.

There are scenes here that are genuinely extraordinary. One sequence involving father and son setting off parked car alarms together becomes this weirdly euphoric portrait of hope, masculinity, and immigrant aspiration. Two men briefly convincing themselves the future might finally open up for them. Moments like that reveal what the film could have been if it trusted its emotional instincts a little more consistently.

But Butterfly Jam is also constantly sabotaging itself. Balagov jumps abruptly between emotional realism, surreal imagery, grotesque humor, and near-symbolic abstraction in ways that often feel less daring than simply out of control. A scene where acne is “treated” by rubbing backs together while an exotic bird silently watches nearby perfectly captures the film’s energy: bizarre, memorable, faintly ridiculous, somehow both emotionally sincere and impossible to take fully seriously.

You can feel Balagov reaching toward something larger about immigrant masculinity in America, particularly the way men attempt to construct themselves through labor, mythology, physical endurance, and communal expectations. At times the film almost echoes The Brutalist in its interest in masculine self-creation inside marginalized communities. The difference is that The Brutalist arrived at collapse through rigorous coherence, while Butterfly Jam often feels as though the movie itself begins collapsing alongside its protagonist.

And yet I can’t entirely dismiss it, because even in failure the film never feels passive. It’s messy, excessive, occasionally baffling, but undeniably alive — the kind of movie that would rather risk embarrassment than settle for safety.

2. La Vénus électrique (Pierre Salvadori) [Out of Competition]
Pierre Salvadori has made enough romantic comedies built around misunderstandings, emotional confusion, and people lying to each other in increasingly complicated ways that by now he could probably direct one in his sleep. Some of them have been delightful, others considerably less inspired. La Vénus électrique lands somewhere comfortably in the middle: not exactly revelatory, but a genuinely pleasant and surprisingly emotionally intelligent way to open the festival.

The premise is classic Salvadori farce. A painter devastated by the death of his beloved wife mistakes a charming circus scam artist for a spiritual medium. Encouraged by his opportunistic impresario, the woman agrees to continue the fake séances in the hope of pulling the artist out of his grief and convincing him to paint again. What initially plays like a light comedy of deception slowly reveals a much sadder emotional structure underneath.

What works particularly well is how clearly the film mirrors its relationships across past and present. There’s the dead wife, the grieving artist, and the manipulative impresario in the past timeline; then the fake medium, the widower, and the same impresario figure recreating those emotional dynamics in the present. Once Salvadori establishes this structure, the film moves elegantly between timelines and tones, gradually allowing melancholy to seep into the comedy without ever collapsing fully into drama.

What surprised me most is how much the film quietly revolves around survival. Both female characters - played by Vimala Pons and Anaïs Demoustier - feel shaped less by romance than by pain they’ve already endured long before the story begins. Salvadori only hints at their histories, but both women carry themselves like survivors constantly negotiating happiness around emotionally fragile men who are ultimately far weaker and less devoted than they are. Vimala Pons in particular becomes the film’s emotional revelation. At first she seems destined to remain trapped in one of cinema’s oldest archetypes: the idealized dead wife haunting a man’s memory through flashbacks and nostalgia. Instead, the film gradually gives her interiority, intelligence, artistic sensitivity, and eventually even narrative control through her diaries. By the end, she feels less like a memory than the person who understood everyone else most clearly all along.

That attentiveness to its female characters is what elevates La Vénus électrique above being merely a well-made diversion. Salvadori directs the women here with a generosity and emotional precision that feels unusually thoughtful for this type of romantic comedy. The film may never fully transcend its familiar structure, but it understands its characters deeply enough to give the melancholy underneath the whimsy real emotional weight.

And finally....

1. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun)
[Opening Film Un Certain Regard]
The most original, ambitious, and exciting of the festival openers by a fairly wide margin, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma confirms Jane Schoenbrun as one of the defining cinematic voices for the new generation of cinephiles.

A full review follows tonight because this one deserves more space.