The red carpet was rolled out. The Grand Palais steps received their annual consecration. And by the time Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss had played to its first festival audience on the night of May 12, the 79th Cannes Film Festival had established something about itself that the coming days will either confirm or complicate.
Opening nights at Cannes are not primarily about the opening film — a truth that Salvadori’s witty, period-set comedy illustrated rather than undermined. La Vénus Électrique is exactly the kind of film Cannes chooses to open with when it wants the festival to feel like a celebration before it becomes a competition: generous, formally assured, built for the Lumière’s particular acoustic warmth. Jane Fonda, Heidi Klum, Gilles Lellouche, Anaïs Demoustier, and Vimala Pons joined director Salvadori on the carpet; the film played well; the crowd was warm.
But what the evening produced that will outlast the memory of any individual look or moment was a set of opening statements — from the jury, from the fashion houses, from the institution itself — that deserve to be read carefully.
Peter Jackson, Elijah Wood, and the Weight of a Palme
The Honorary Palme d’Or photocall brought Peter Jackson to the Grand Palais steps with his children — Katie Jackson, Billy Jackson — alongside Carlos Ramírez Laloli and Ken Kamis. Elijah Wood was also present, a detail that carried its own particular emotional resonance for anyone for whom the Lord of the Rings trilogy represents a formative encounter with what cinema can do at the largest scale.
The festival formally kicked off with the poster installation, then moved to Hotel Martinez, where jury president Park Chan-wook and his fellow jurors dined on the eve of opening night. Jackson’s honorary Palme arrives at a specific cultural moment: the Cannes Classics program this year will present The Fellowship of the Ring in a newly restored 4K print, returning the film to the venue — the projection room — for which it was always most suited.
The Jackson honorary acknowledges something that Cannes has historically been ambivalent about: the legitimacy of fantasy and scale as vehicles for genuine cinematic achievement. That the filmmaker responsible for the most commercially successful fantasy trilogy in cinema history is being honored here — in the same week that a restored Pan’s Labyrinth drew its famous standing ovation tribute at the Debussy — suggests an institution making a considered argument about what it values, and what it has sometimes been too narrow to recognize.
Barbra Streisand’s Honorary Palme, presented separately, extends that argument into a different register: the legitimacy of the popular, the commercially significant, the culturally omnipresent. Two honorary Palmes in the same edition, one for a fantasy blockbuster director and one for a singer-actress-filmmaker whose work has always lived at the intersection of high art and mass appeal, is a curatorial statement. It will be interesting to see whether the competition program validates or contradicts it over the coming eleven days.
The Jury Appears: Fashion and Film in a Single Frame
The jury photocall — which functions as the festival’s opening visual statement, before any competition films have screened — produced the images that will circulate most widely in the opening days of coverage. Demi Moore attended in Jacquemus with Chopard jewelry at the opening ceremony, Chloé Zhao appeared in Celine at the jury photocall, while Park Chan-wook presided with the specific quiet authority that his filmography — Oldboy, Thirst, Decision to Leave — has made recognizable internationally.
The jury’s collective fashion choices on opening night are worth parsing beyond their immediate aesthetic interest, because they establish the register in which nine people will spend eleven days appearing publicly while discussing cinema in private.
Demi Moore in Jacquemus is a choice with multiple layers. Jacquemus is a house defined by Mediterranean warmth and a specific kind of joyful accessibility — aesthetics that fit the Riviera setting precisely. Moore’s recent career trajectory — the The Substance (2024), which generated both commercial and critical success and returned her to a global visibility she had not occupied for decades — makes her presence on the jury something more than a celebrity appointment. She arrives as a performer with fresh artistic credibility, dressed in a house that signals she is not performing for the traditional fashion establishment.
Chloé Zhao in Celine communicates a different message. Celine under Hedi Slimane is a house of studied restraint, of a particular kind of cool that reads as considered rather than effortful. For a director whose work — Songs My Brothers Taught Me, Nomadland, Eternals — spans independent cinema, Academy recognition, and franchise production, the choice of a house that holds formal discipline above all else is its own kind of statement.
Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu — best known internationally as Sylvie Grateau in Emily in Paris, where her relationship with the fashion world has been extensively documented both on and off screen — wore Saint Laurent Spring/Summer 2026: the house that has most consistently owned the Cannes red carpet’s specific combination of glamour and intellectual edge across the past decade.
The Electric Kiss: What the Opening Film Actually Does
La Vénus Électrique — a 1920s-set comedy from Pierre Salvadori, the director of Priceless (2006) and Wild Target (1993) — arrived at a festival with no obligation to be great and proceeded to be considerably better than comfortable. The film stars Anaïs Demoustier and Pio Marmaï in a period setting that allows Salvadori’s characteristic lightness to operate within a visual register more formally ambitious than his contemporary-set work has usually required.
The cast — Jane Fonda, Gustave de Kervern, Pio Marmaï, Pierre Salvadori, Anaïs Demoustier, Vimala Pons and Gilles Lellouche — attended the opening ceremony. Fonda’s presence gives the occasion a specific generational weight: she attended the Cannes festival for the first time decades ago, and her continued engagement with the cultural event that cinema produces at its most formal is itself a kind of argument for cinema’s continuing relevance.
The opening film’s job is not to compete with the competition but to establish tone. The Electric Kiss establishes a tone of warmth, of craft in service of feeling, and of a certain French confidence in the value of entertainment that takes its own pleasure seriously. Whether that tone persists into the competition program — which includes Farhadi, Mungiu, Hamaguchi, and Park’s jury making decisions about all of them — will become clear over the next eleven days.
The Competition Begins: What Screens Today and Tomorrow
Day 2 at Cannes brings the competition into active motion. Kantemir Balagov’s Butterfly Jam served as the opening film of Directors’ Fortnight on May 13, while Jane Schoenbrun’s slasher film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opens the Midnight screenings section.
Schoenbrun’s presence at Cannes Midnight is one of the 2026 edition’s more significant programming choices. I Saw the TV Glow (2024) established them as one of American cinema’s most formally distinctive voices working in the space between genre and psychological portraiture, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — with Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson — arrives with the kind of pre-premiere discussion that the Midnight section exists to accommodate.
The competition proper begins its main public phase today with photocalls and premieres that will establish the early conversation about Palme d’Or contenders. Among the films most discussed in the coming days: Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, and Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord — the English-language debut that has generated the most sustained pre-festival discussion of any competition title.
Fast and Furious at the Grand Lumière: What It Means
Tonight brings one of the 2026 edition’s most discussed programming decisions: a Midnight Screening of The Fast and the Furious (2001, dir. Rob Cohen) at the Grand Lumière Theater, celebrating the franchise’s 25th anniversary.
The choice to screen a film whose entire cultural identity is built on speed, spectacle, and the democratic pleasures of action cinema at a festival most associated with the opposite values is not a provocation — or not only a provocation. It is a statement about what the festival believes cinema is and who it is for.
There will be a midnight screening of the beloved street racing film at the Grand Lumière Theater to celebrate its 25th anniversary. The film that launched a franchise generating over $7 billion in global box office — that made Vin Diesel a star, that understood something about the pleasures of communal moviegoing that more formally ambitious productions sometimes forget — arriving at Cannes 25 years after its release says something specific about the festival’s evolving relationship with popular cinema.
It is worth noting that the last time The Fast and the Furious premiered anywhere near the Palais des Festivals, it was considered entirely beneath the festival’s notice. That it is now being screened in the festival’s largest and most ceremonially significant venue — the same Lumière that will host the Palme d’Or ceremony on May 23 — is a genuine shift. Whether that shift reflects intellectual seriousness or institutional insecurity about its own relevance is the question the screening will generate more than any formal critical discussion.
The Marché du Film: The Festival’s Other Opening
While the competition films and the red carpet occupy most of the world’s attention, the Marché du Film opened its doors simultaneously — and the two events, while occupying the same physical space, operate in almost entirely parallel universes.
The Marché du Film is where cinema is bought and sold. International distributors, streaming platforms, sales agents, and producers meet to transact the actual business of global film distribution — who gets to show which film, in which territory, at what price. This year’s Marché has a particular significance for Asian content: Japan is the 2026 Marché honor country, and the presence of Japanese IP — anime properties, classic franchise films, contemporary auteur work — at the market’s highest-profile moment reflects the sustained international appetite for Japanese content that has grown throughout the streaming era.
Chinese productions are present in the Marché with increasing regularity and confidence, though their presence often remains less visible in the festival’s primary media coverage than their commercial significance in the actual market transactions would suggest. The gap between visibility and significance in the international film market is a recurring theme at Cannes — one that the development of Chinese content’s international profile over the coming years will continue to test.
What to Watch: The Next 48 Hours
The competition’s first major screenings arrive Wednesday and Thursday, bringing the films that the jury will begin evaluating and that the press will begin arguing about. The early competition favorites — Farhadi, Mungiu, Hamaguchi — will all screen in the coming days, and the critical conversation that determines how the Palme d’Or race is perceived internationally will begin to take shape.
The red carpet will continue to evolve as the competition cast arrives. Scarlett Johansson (Paper Tiger, dir. James Gray) is expected in the coming days. Léa Seydoux (Gentle Monster, dir. Marie Kreutzer) brings with her the full weight of a Louis Vuitton ambassador relationship that is among the festival’s most established fashion stories. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve (Fjord, dir. Cristian Mungiu) arrive having both established international profiles — Stan through The Apprentice (2024) and A Different Man (2025), Reinsve through The Worst Person in the World (2021) — that give their competition appearance genuine star dimension.
And somewhere in the Marché, in the hotel suites on the Croisette, in the yacht conversations that will not be photographed, the real business of international cinema is proceeding alongside the public spectacle.
This is what Cannes is: eleven days in which the art and the commerce of cinema are conducted simultaneously, in full public view and entirely behind closed doors, on the same strip of coastline, sometimes within the same building.
Day one has established the temperature. The competition will determine the outcome.
EntertainLens is covering the 79th Cannes Film Festival daily through May 23. Film analysis, red carpet fashion, and Marché du Film reports at entertainlens.com.
Film & Fashion Reference: Opening Night, May 12, 2026
Honorary Palme d’Or recipients: Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Bad Taste, Heavenly Creatures, They Shall Not Grow Old) — attended with children Katie Jackson and Billy Jackson; Elijah Wood present Barbra Streisand (Funny Girl, The Way We Were, A Star Is Born, Yentl)
Opening film cast attending: Pierre Salvadori (director), Jane Fonda, Anaïs Demoustier, Pio Marmaï, Vimala Pons, Gilles Lellouche, Gustave de Kervern
Jury photocall — selected fashion: Demi Moore — Jacquemus with Chopard jewelry Chloé Zhao — Celine Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu — Saint Laurent Spring/Summer 2026 Park Chan-wook — jury president
Opening night red carpet — selected appearances: Jane Fonda — Dior haute couture with Chopard jewelry Heidi Klum — opening ceremony Dame Joan Collins — opening ceremony (My Duchess) Poppy Delevingne — opening ceremony
Jewellery houses dominant opening night: Chopard (official festival partner), Pomellato
Competition begins: May 13, 2026 Palme d’Or ceremony: May 23, 2026
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