What do a filmmaker who battles the political regime of his country, a postmodern trickster, and a master of deconstructing history have in common? All three take us on journeys through a social landscape teetering on the edge of madness. At Cannes this year, the journey – whether to the ends of the earth or just to the end of the street – was a recurring motif that revealed something essential about the human condition.

The situation of Iranian filmmakers disturbing the Tehran regime is nothing if not paradoxical. After Mohammad Rasoulof, who competed last year with a dark and poetic indictment, it’s now Jafar Panahi’s turn. Imprisoned two years ago – an unfortunate climax to more than a decade of harassment, provocations, and open repression from the theocratic powers – Panahi has long enjoyed the status of a cause célèbre at festivals. Somehow, his films still get made – in the now-familiar clandestine conditions, with economically intelligent shooting – and they reach the West after secretive work processes, with admirable regularity. Like Rasoulof, Panahi remains political, holding up a mirror to the censors that reflects a society gone mad, one in which it’s unpleasant to recognise yourself, no matter how you look at it. In Iran’s dictatorship, films are endowed with an urgent political aura – like blunt objects designed to hurt the local powers – that Western cinema lost long ago.

A Simple Accident is a film universal enough to seduce from the outset, yet concrete enough to avoid heavy-handed allegory. Panahi directs the narrative deftly, focusing here on a few long scenes, rather than playing with the mise-en-scène and the porous line between fiction and documentary as he did in his earlier work. Though made with minimal means, the film conjures much: all it takes is a van containing a potential regime torturer and a few former prisoners thirsting for revenge to produce a snapshot of the nation. It may not be particularly fresh – often veering dangerously close to the idea of Evil with a capital E – but it’s solid: in this unstable power dynamic lies the quintessence of a violent and unjust political system that deforms the human soul. Panahi has one clear idea – that under dictatorship, we all end up sullied and caught in the dance of infamy, regardless of which side we’re on – and the film illustrates it concisely (reverse shots are systematically avoided, activating the full presence of the off-screen), in stark contrast to the baroque gesturing that has become common in recent arthouse cinema.

The film is already seen as a frontrunner for the top prize, but I must admit it captivated me only intermittently. Its moral dilemma is already a cliché in Iranian fiction cinema, which has fallen in recent years into a dreary rut lacking inspiration. As for the cynical satire – such as the police forces who reflexively demand money from citizens, then instantly whip out a POS terminal when told there’s no cash – it feels like a shortcut to the Western world’s sympathetic favour. Panahi is strongest in the moments – regrettably rare in this film – when he lingers on the reality beyond the windshield. In the film’s opening, a fluid surveillance sequence reveals the unscripted spectacle of the city, during which a stray dog appears and disappears, stealing the spotlight from the subject lost in the background. Likewise, in his search, the protagonist stumbles upon a pre-wedding photo shoot, which forces him to cooperate with a fiery bride and a timid groom. The burlesque tendency doesn’t last long, though – the film soon returns to its sober (but also predictable) tone of real-time testimony from a haunted society.

Wes Anderson returned to the competition this year with The Phoenician Scheme, starring Benicio del Toro as a 1950s industrialist who seeks out a major business opportunity in the Middle East. On his side are his more or less adopted daughter (Mia Threapleton) – an Andersonian ambiguity lingers over this nun summoned back to civilian life by her father’s schemes – and a biologist who turns out to be an American secret agent (Michael Cera). Between him and his objective stands a star-studded cast – from Riz Ahmed as a dandyish prince, to Benedict Cumberbatch as a rival eyeing the desert’s riches, to Mathieu Amalric as the token Frenchman – giving Anderson the perfect excuse to unroll his familiar picaresque journey, this time diverting the  “hero on a quest” myth into a predatory raid, all set against the backdrop of colonial politics in their twilight phase. Ever the ironist, Anderson puts his compositional flair to work both in service of spectacle – the film opens with an aerial sequence worthy of retro spy flicks – and a political reading of the past (national stereotypes and instant geopolitics). As always, the result teeters between Instagrammable kitsch and miniature boutique vertigo.

Over time, however, The Phoenician Scheme proves disembodied and repetitive, an empty shell that Anderson animates as best he can. For me, the film’s strongest moment comes when the characters crash yet again – you’d think Anderson is making a prequel to the endlessly shredded-and-reassembled volunteer in Mickey 17 – in a forest, where the wrecked fuselage, a spinning wheel, and scattered debris harmonize with the foliage in a kind of geometric meditation. Immediately afterwards, the protagonist sinks into a swamp and is rescued by his sidekick – cut to the two, painted in bluish-grey, like a pair of happening-style effigies. Elsewhere, the director’s dioramas deflate as the film – essentially a lab experiment – gets lost in a string of forgettable escapades. Anderson’s pop visual precision – something like a Paradjanov left at Disneyland by distracted parents – fails to conceal the opacity of a story whose nonsense isn’t redeemed by its wit. The rhymes within (repeated lines, recurring sketches) build a consequence-free world where everything flows far too smoothly.

We’re used to Lav Diaz working in stark black and white, a tireless craftsman devoted to expansive films that defy theatrical norms – so a colour historical drama under three hours, starring Gael García Bernal, already sounds like a blockbuster from him. Diaz worked on Magellan with cinematographer Artur Tort, longtime collaborator of Albert Serra (who is credited as a producer), to tell the story of the titular explorer in a series of painterly vignettes – somewhere between Rembrandt and Frans Post – that turn the landscape into an endless accumulation of beauty. Above all, the film is about the changing quality of light and the joy of setting camp in an unspoiled setting. From the Philippine jungle to the open sea, Magellan-Bernal charts the new map of the modern world, leaving behind pain, madness, and death (the final images depict a beach littered with corpses).

True to Diaz’s style, Magellan is a bit too systematic in its sculptural slowness to invent something new (as Manoel de Oliveira did in the Vasco da Gama chapter of Non ou a Vã Glória de Mandar) – but it still contains some truly spectral moments where grace seems to descend into the image. The most intense comes when Magellan, journeying by ship toward distant Asia, falls into a hallucination of power – midway between Heart of Darkness and Paulo Rocha’s A Ilha dos Amores (1982), where a former diplomat isolates himself from the world. Here, the commander loses his crew’s loyalty while retreating to the ship’s hold, comforting himself with the mental image of his departed lover. I witnessed a mysterious resonance between the ever-emptying room at the Palais des Festivals – as if viewers had expected a romantic comedy, not a silent meditation on history’s unfathomable ravages – and the ship, increasingly tattered and demonic, on the verge of becoming a ghost vessel adrift.

I left Magellan with mixed feelings, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. Balancing its aestheticism with an almost metallic digital image, the film unspools this epic tale without seducing us: it remains, to the end, a distanced display of white barbarism, with Magellan as captain of the ship of fools. Solar and photogenic, the virgin landscape yields itself to the camera’s embrace, while the indigenous people perform an opaque ritual from which the festival audience – like the early explorer – retains only a visceral memory beyond words. Slowly, the character descends into debauchery and megalomania, dragging a faint army towards certain massacre. Magellan isn’t a new Non ou…, since Diaz is less playful and protean – but the two films share a similar historical awareness and a rejection of triumphalist Eurocentrism. Without any redemptive revisionism – the “subaltern” doesn’t speak here as compensation; at most, he returns the favour in a burst of violence – the film charts not a path to progress, but to apocalypse. Magellan is the angriest film I’ve seen at Cannes this year, but its fury takes the form of poetry, not noise.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.