Ryusuke Hamaguchi's three-hour-sixteen-minute All of a Sudden screened in Competition Saturday morning at 8 a.m. It is his twelfth festival appearance, and it organizes Cannes Day 5 around an Asian auteur rather than an American premiere. Park Chan-wook chairs the jury. Le Monde's Saturday dispatch, published the same morning, declared American cinema "not taking center stage on the Croisette this year." [1] [2]

The paper's Friday account of Cannes Day 4 testing whether politics is the jury's operating system named Park Chan-wook's "politics and art cannot be separated" framing as the festival's working sentence. Saturday's question is taste, not language. A three-hour-sixteen-minute Hamaguchi at 8 a.m. is a scheduling decision that telegraphs jury weight before any prize is awarded. The slot is not punishment. It is treatment as a major work.

Hamaguchi has been a Cannes regular for a decade. Drive My Car was a 2021 Competition entry that won Best Screenplay before its Oscar campaign. Evil Does Not Exist premiered in Venice in 2023. His twelfth festival appearance is not an introduction; it is the kind of relationship Cannes builds with directors it intends to keep close. Variety's listing of the Competition slate carries Hamaguchi as one of the few non-European entries this year. [2] IMDb's filmography page documents the body of work that produced the slot. [3]

The aesthetic decision Park Chan-wook has made public — that politics and art belong inside each other — finds a natural object in Hamaguchi. His films do not editorialize. They observe long enough that the politics of a marriage, a workplace, a city, or a region becomes visible without needing to be named. That is the formal commitment a long-running Cannes jury can reward without contradiction. A jury president who has said the obvious thing about politics can endorse a director whose work makes the obvious thing slow.

Le Monde's dispatch states the Croisette diagnosis plainly. [1] American cinema is not the festival's center this year. The English-language slate is shorter than usual. Hollywood booked sales agents instead of premieres for the May market. The Saturday morning programming grid confirmed it — Hamaguchi in the morning Competition slot, French and Korean auteurs anchoring evening galas, no American Competition title scheduled this weekend. The companion piece in this edition treats that retreat as a balance-sheet event.

The jury politics make the programming politics legible. Park's framing tells distributors how to read prizes. Laverty's separate Hollywood-blacklist intervention, treated elsewhere in this edition as a press-freedom artifact, tells distributors how to read absences. The two add up to a Cannes that is not just continental in mood; it is operating under a different prestige logic than it did a decade ago. Hamaguchi at 8 a.m. is the visible center of gravity.

That center of gravity is not new in kind, only in degree. Cannes has always been a European festival hosting world cinema; the Asian auteur Competition tradition runs from Wong Kar-wai through Bong Joon-ho through Park himself through Hamaguchi. What is new is that the festival's aesthetic axis has tilted east at the same moment American studios have routed their prestige spending elsewhere. The tilt is not a critique of American cinema. It is a description of where the prestige market has moved.

MSM has covered the Hamaguchi screening as a Competition entry. That is accurate and underweighted. The narrower observation is that Park's jury has chosen to honor a three-hour-sixteen-minute formal commitment with prime morning placement on Day 5 of a festival whose first week has been dominated by politics. The placement is the jury's way of saying that taste, not commentary, is still the criterion. Hamaguchi's film either rewards the placement or it does not. A jury that begins by championing slow observation can survive a slow film. It cannot survive a slow film that is also empty.

The Palme arrives in a week. Hamaguchi is now an active contender on the basis of the slot, the running time, and the festival's institutional memory. Park's "politics and art belong together" sentence makes him a natural recipient if the jury wants to vote its taste rather than the moment. The week's other contenders carry their own freight — Iranian, Korean, French, Russian, all marked by political weight in their countries' presses. Hamaguchi is the entry the jury can endorse without taking a position on anyone else's politics.

That is the prestige-cycle realignment the May 15 jury-politics piece predicted in compressed form. The Day 5 grid makes it visible. American cinema is not retreating from Cannes because Cannes is hostile to American cinema. It is retreating because the festival is busy being European and Asian on its own schedule, with an Asian auteur at the morning microphone and a European jury that knows what it likes.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles