o, after its unprecedented break last year, Cannes is back, like Euro 2020, although this is, of course, a whole new set of fixtures. Last year’s notionally selected films were simply allowed out on to the world’s streaming platforms with the #Cannes2020 kitemark. At first glance, the big losers this year would appear to be the Britons. The French government has already banned UK nationals from coming to France on account of the Indian variant (although exemptions for UK festival delegates are reportedly being negotiated) and there are no British directors or movies in competition, although British production funds have gone into some and Andrea Arnold’s new film is showing in the inaugural Cannes Premieres section. The British pavilion will not be on the Croisette: it is going online. A pretty downbeat post-Brexit Cannes from the flag-wavers’ point of view. Those delegates who are allowed in will have to take a test every 48 hours, while social distancing rules will apply, socialising will be restricted, and festival director Thierry Frémaux told us that he would not be kissing directors on the steps of the Palais – although “there will be dinners!” There will also be some of the familiar big Cannes auteur names: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Bruno Dumont, Asghar Farhadi and Jacques Audiard. Elsewhere the debating points are the same. Cannes is toughly sticking to its line on Netflix: if a Netflix film has not committed to a deal with French cinemas, then it doesn’t get a competition slot. Cannes is all about the big screen and the real experience. As for the issue of gender, there are just four female directors in the competition lineup, indicating that Cannes is simply not particularly exercised about this in the same way as the Anglo-Saxons of, say, Toronto. But the female directors in the selection are some of the most exciting in this year’s festival. Mia Hansen-Løve comes to the festival with Bergman Island, starring Mia Wasikowska and Tim Roth, the story of two American film-makers who go to the island once home to Ingmar Bergman on a retreat to work on a script – with disquieting results. Ildikó Enyedi is the Hungarian director of the bizarrely erotic tale On Body and Soul; now she comes to Cannes with The Story of My Wife, with Léa Seydoux and Louis Garrel, about a sea captain who makes a bet with a friend in a bar that he will marry the first woman who walks in. Probably the biggest ticket, and the film that most observers are most excited about, is the musical Annette, starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, by the veteran auteur and provocateur Leos Carax, with music by Ron and Russell Mael, of Sparks fame. This is the film expected to provide the shock or wow factor, the sort of thing Haneke or Von Trier would normally provide. Cannes will be looking to Carax to get everyone furiously arguing as they stream out of the Palais. Wes Anderson’s much-anticipated comedy The French Dispatch is expected to be a slam dunk popular choice, starring Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand and Timothée Chalamet. It will provide the all-star confectionery that will boost the festival’s blood sugar, although many have seen the trailer so often that they feel they have seen the film already. The Thai artist and film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul is presenting his Memoria, featuring the now-ubiquitous art cinema muse Tilda Swinton and Jeanne Balibar, set in 1970s Colombia and avowedly about colonialism and how collective memory can lead to fear. The great Italian director Nanni Moretti, also a Palme winner for his sublimely sad The Son’s Room, is in competition for his ensemble drama Three Floors. Sean Baker, whose film-making is a classic product of the low-budget digital revolution, has a new film in the festival called Red Rocket, about a washed-up male porn star who makes an inglorious return to his Texas home town. As far as the French are concerned, iconic festival veteran Vincent Lindon comes to Cannes in Titane, from Julia Ducournau (who made the cannibal horror Raw) and this promises to be something comparably grisly. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi stars in The Fracture by Catherine Corsini, about two women laid up in hospital who find themselves in the middle of a scary situation. So this is an embattled Cannes, a Cannes that has had to insist on its very existence as it emerges from the Covid lockdown. But all the more intriguing for that.