Movie Poster of the Week: The Posters of the 2017 Cannes Competition

The annual round-up of posters for the films vying for this year’s Palme d’Or.
Adrian Curry

Above: Redoubtable by Michel Hazanavicius (France)

It’s that time of year again: time for those of us who are not in Cannes for the next two weeks to live vicariously through Twitter (and of course MUBI’s always insightful coverage). For me, the first glimpse of the films that I am missing on the Croisette are the posters. Often rushed out as an afterthought to a film that is itself barely out of the editing room, Cannes posters are sometimes slapdash, often just serviceable. But there are always standouts, like The Handmaiden last year and The Lobster the year before that, both of which ended up among my favorite posters of the year.

Say what you will about his previous foray into film history, but Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable—about Jean-Luc Godard’s relationship with Anne Wiazemsky, set during the making of La chinoise and with Louis Garrel playing Godard no less—must be one of the most anticipated of this year’s films even if only for curiosity’s sake. Its poster, with its Godardian color scheme, hits all the right notes and could almost have been the campaign for this year’s festival itself.

Other highlights include the eccentrically composed poster for Sophia Coppola’s The Beguiled, about which Indiewire’s David Ehrlich tweeted “drape this over my casket like a flag when I die”; the elegantly simple design for Hong Sang-soo’s The Day After (note how lettering is key in both posters); the garish neon of the what-the-hell-is-going-on-in-this-poster poster for the Safdies’ Good Time; the beam-me-up-Scotty blur of the Killing of a Sacred Deer poster (released just yesterday); and the somber cabinet-of-curiosities delight of the teaser for Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck. But best of all must be the poster for Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, which, even more so than Wonderstruck, promises much in the way of weird and wonderful things.

Posters are still missing for five films, including two that I would be most excited to see were I there: Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless and Ruben Östlund’s The Square. If any of them turn up during the festival I will add them below. In the meantime, here is the rest of the Palme d’Or competition in alphabetical order.

Above: L’amant double by François Ozon (France)

Above: The Beguiled by Sofia Coppola (USA)

Above: The Day After by Hong Sang-soo (South Korea)

Above: A Gentle Creature by Sergei Loznitsa (Ukraine/France)

Above: Good Time by Joshua and Ben Safdie (USA)

Above: Happy End by Michael Haneke (France/Germany/Austria)

Above: In the Fade by Fatih Akin (Germany)

Above: Jupiter’s Moon by Kornél Mundruczó (Hungary)

Above: The Killing of a Sacred Deer by Yorgos Lanthimos (Ireland/UK/USA)

Above: Okja by Bong Joon-ho (South Korea/USA)

Above: Radiance by Naomi Kawase (Japan/France)

Above: Rodin by Jacques Doillon (France/Belgium)

Above: Wonderstruck by Todd Haynes (USA)

Still to come:

120 Beats per Minute by Robin Campillo (France)

Loveless by Andrey Zvyagintsev (Russia)

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) by Noah Baumbach (USA)

The Square by Ruben Östlund (Sweden)

You Were Never Really Here by Lynne Ramsay (UK)

See previous Cannes Competition round-ups here: 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011. And follow me on Twitter for any updates.

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