A new Jim Jarmusch film usually means a Cannes premiere, so its absence from this year’s Croisette slate caught many off guard. Instead, “Father Mother Sister Brother” debuted in Venice — a move that proved him right, as it went on to take home the Golden Lion.
It was last April that word got out that Jarmusch’s film had been rejected by the Cannes Film Festival. The news came as a surprise, since Jarmusch typically enjoys something of a free pass at Cannes, and the prior month Variety had even reported that the film was one of the few titles locked in for competition.
Jarmusch has now clarified what happened, via IndieWire, explaining that Cannes opted not to include the film in its main competition and instead offered to screen it out of competition — a decision that rubbed him the wrong way:
“I submitted it to Cannes, and we were told, ‘It’s not selected for competition. We might put it in a different section.’ To which I responded, ‘I haven’t made a film in five years. I’ve been in Cannes many times. That’s not appropriate to me,'” he said. “Competition’s very important to me in Cannes, not for the competition, but for the profile of the release of my film, so I can start getting the investors paid back, and I can make another film. It’s not about the awards.”
“So I told [Cannes Film Festival director] Thierry Frémaux, ‘No, I’m sorry, I think I won’t have the film in Cannes.’ And showed it immediately to Venice the next day,” he said. “Anyway, it’s OK. It was a good thing. And in a way, I really thank him for it because I got to go to Venice, and Cannes is in May. And I went up to my house in the Catskills for the month of May, and I wrote my new script. So, instead of going to Cannes, I have a new script which is in the works.”
Jarmusch is going as far as to say that his bad experience with Cannes, and subsequent triumph at Venice, has made him rethink the strategy for his next film:
Now I kind of never want to go to Cannes. After I gave my little speech up there, that I kind of improvised, someone in the back of the auditorium says, ‘Jim, you know we love you!’ And everybody applauded, right? They were giving me real, sincere love. It wasn’t 2,000 French hairdressers from L’Oréal in Cannes, you know what I mean? It was real. And that was really moving. I never felt that before.
Yikes. Jarmusch taking a shot at Cannes and its audience wasn’t on my bingo card.
Listen, it’s not hard to see why Cannes might have passed on “Father, Mother, Sister, Brother”: this is Jarmusch stripped down beyond the bare bones, a film composed of pauses and absences, moments waiting for resolution and finding none. It’s his most experimental film, but it’s also sweetly rewarding — not his best, but far from his worst.