The hell that is Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga broke loose on the second night of Cannes Film Festival, a prime slot for one of the most eagerly awaited films of the year. Billed as a world premiere, it was the first of the festival’s event films after the opening night’s much shorter and more frivolous French film A Second Act.
Anticipation grew over the day, with fans coming with chairs to nab a good spot to watch the red carpet “marche”. A sprinkling of stars arrived in advance: Faye Dunaway, now 83 and in Cannes for the screening of a documentary about her life; Baz Luhrmann, whose Elvis screened in Cannes two years ago; and model Naomi Campbell.
George Miller, Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth and his wife Elsa Pataky depart the “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival overnight.Credit: Getty
What really ignited the excitement of the fans behind the barriers, however, was the arrival of the Furiosa film team. Cheers raised the roof over the red carpet as Chris Hemsworth, in a gleaming white dinner jacket with black trousers – but without the regulation black tie – worked his way down the railings, signing autographs and shaking hands.
Anya Taylor-Joy, in a retro lurex strapless gown with a sweeping tulle skirt, slid gracefully under shoulders for selfie shots. With her hair dyed platinum blonde and set in an elaborate French twist, she looked like Grace Kelly returned to the Riviera.
Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga is a high-octane, turbocharged pageant of roaring trucks, maniac bikers bouncing over the dunes and one young woman’s mission to avenge the death of her mother.
Kidnapped in childhood and raised by a succession of monstrous villains usually at war with each other, Furiosa eventually escapes their clutches to join forces with a lone-wolf driver who ferries petrol and fresh food – both precious commodities in the post-apocalyptic wastelands of Australia – between these monstrous leaders’ heavily armed citadels. They fight off cavalcades of pirates as they hurtle along the Fury Road. Taylor-Joy plays Furiosa; Tom Burke is Jack, her mentor; Hemsworth is the evil Dr Dementus, the biker leader who kidnaps and adopts her.
By the end of its two-and-a-half hours, there was no question that the fifth instalment of the Mad Max franchise would be an enormous hit. During the six-minute standing ovation, Taylor-Joy made a point of directing cameras to director George Miller, standing next to her. Hemsworth, standing on his other side, slapped his shoulder. All three were wreathed in relieved smiles. Reviews, which were under embargo until the end of the screening, erupted with the force of a petrol tank exploding on the Fury Road.
The Guardian thrilled to “George Miller’s immersive, spectacular prequel to his Mad Max reboot” with its “crazily colossal and weird convoy-action sequences which fuse the notion of ‘chase’ and ‘violent combat’.“ The Telegraph in London compared it to a classic western. “Furiosa is cinema at its most soul-pricklingly primal,” wrote Robbie Collin.
“It’s the sort of film that makes you feel like the past century of Hollywood might have been a detour, and the machine has now been hauled back on course.” There were naysayers who suggested it was big on spectacle but short on vision, but nobody could deny its impact.
Chris Hemsworth said before the screening that it was the first time he had been to the Cannes Film Festival. “I’m really excited to go and honoured to be a part of it,” he said, adding that he hadn’t been in films that were invited. “But this film has obviously been welcomed and people are excited for it. I’ve also heard it can be a nerve-wracking experience because there’s a lot of honesty around the reactions.” He need not have worried.
Anya Taylor-Joy plays the lead role of Furiosa.
“Chris Hemsworth is so good as a baddie,” said Wendy Ide, chief critic at the London Observer, after a press screening. “And that blend of monstrous cruelty and sentimentality in his character is really interesting.” Deadline’s review declared it the best performance of his career.
George Miller told Associated Press that he had been on the jury in Cannes three times over the years. He was jury president in 2016. “I got addicted to it because it’s like film camp,” he said. “As a jury member, that’s a big thing. And then to have your film shown there and get the feedback almost immediately as to the worth or otherwise of your film is a really interesting thing because a film only exists in an audience, to make of it what they will.”
Mad Max: Fury Road, which went on to gain 10 Oscar nominations, also had its world premiere in an out-of-competition slot in Cannes. There is no underplaying the importance of a Cannes launch to draw attention to a film, but especially a quirky independent.
The Surfer, an Australian film showing in a midnight slot on Friday, stars Nicolas Cage as an old surfer who returns to his West Australian stamping ground to find himself excluded by the locals, then becoming the target of a sinister surf-based cult.
“I couldn’t think of a better launch than a midnight showing in Cannes with Nicolas Cage here,” said producer Robert Connolly. “Cannes has many elements, but the midnight screenings give a chance for a film to be celebrated almost for its audacious, playful, fun elements within a festival that is the peak of what film-makers aspire to do. And everyone’s here.”
There are around 200 representatives of the Australian film business in Cannes looking to put together co-productions; The Surfer is a co-production with companies in Ireland, the US and Britain and has an Irish director, Lorcan Finnegan. “I feel coming to Cannes I have a little more spring in my step about the possibilities of how we can all work together in the world of cinema and that those films can travel,” says Connolly. “The Surfer has sold incredibly well.”
“It is a place where unknown films can be discovered. You think of films that have shown here like Strictly Ballroom and the whole journey that went on. And here we are years later, with one of the great Australian auteurs making huge films, began here with a surprising discovery many decades ago. I think Australian films have had a bit of a tradition of that, becoming events in Cannes. And it’s fun.”
Chris Hemsworth is Dr Dementus in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
And it is just beginning. The Cannes Film Festival runs until next Saturday, when awards including the prized Palme d’Or will be awarded by a jury headed this year by Barbie director Greta Gerwig. Other films met with high expectations include Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds and a new, self-financed film from Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola, Megalopolis.
One of the most eagerly awaited is The Apprentice, with Sebastian Stan playing a midlife Donald Trump, by Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi. But there will also be plenty of discoveries that nobody was expecting at all.
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