CANNES, France — Gary Oldman jumped at the chance to be in Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s new coming-of-age drama, Parthenope, even if it was just a small role, the Oscar-winning actor told Reuters.

“I was in anyway. I didn’t care what it would have been either,” said Mr. Oldman on Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival, where the competition film celebrated its premiere.

Mr. Oldman has a bit part as melancholic American novelist John Cheever. The title character, a long-haired beauty played by newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta, is inexplicably drawn to him on vacation.

Parthenope enchants the men in her life, and the film follows her from her birth in the waters of the Bay of Naples to her last day before retiring as a professor of anthropology.

Mr. Sorrentino said his own life experience gave him the idea of following a character through various ages.

“Being in my 50s, well, actually more, I was very fascinated with the idea of recounting the melancholies, sorrows, and hopes that revolve around the passing of time,” he said.

“And so, from there I came up with the idea of doing a long tale of a woman from when she was born until today,” he added.

Mr. Sorrentino noted that the heroine’s development also coincides with that of the city of Naples.

“Parthenope, in the first part of the film, when she is young, coincides with the city, they are two mysteries,” said Mr. Sorrentino, a Cannes veteran who has brought seven films to compete for the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or.

In the second part, she grows into a free and spontaneous woman who does not judge, which is also like the city, he added at a news conference in the French Riviera resort town.

Naples is sometimes known as Parthenope in reference to the ancient Greek settlement established there, named after a siren who, according to legend, drowned herself after failing to bewitch Odysseus and whose body washed up on the shores of the city.

Mr. Sorrentino won best foreign language film with 2013’s The Great Beauty and was nominated for an Oscar for 2021’s The Hand of God, a personal family tragedy set in 1980s Naples. That film first put Dalla Porta, 26, on the director’s radar.

“The casting agents who chose me as an extra (in The Hand of God) called me to do Paolo Sorrentino’s Bulgari commercial,” she told Reuters. After a year or two, she said, she started auditioning several times for the starring role of Parthenope.

For Dalla Porta, the film not only is an allegory for Naples, but also for her own life.

“Before we started shooting the film I was still in a youthful, carefree phase of my life, where work was still something of a dream and being an actor somewhat an abstract idea,” she said at a news conference alongside Mr. Sorrentino. “But during the process of making the film, it was as if I had to let go of the little girl in me,” she added.

The film’s reception was tepid at best, with The Guardian newspaper calling it a “facile” film and saying it comes close to self-parody. Trade publication IndieWire called it “a superficial meditation on the relationship between youth and beauty.”

CRONENBERG’S GHOULISH THE SHROUDS
David Cronenberg, who has made a career out of the macabre, found that making his deeply personal new film The Shrouds did not lessen the grief he feels over his wife’s death.

“I don’t really think of art, and especially I don’t think of my art as cathartic,” the longtime Canadian director known for body horror classics like The Fly and Videodrome told Reuters on Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival.

The Shrouds, which premiered on Monday evening, marks Mr. Cronenberg’s seventh time competing for the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or.

“The film is funny as well as being sad. It’s a desire to, to play with the figurines in the sandbox, you know, and re-live things the way children do,” Mr. Cronenberg said.

“If you’re grieving, it does not lessen the grief. But it means that you’re addressing it and acknowledging it and playing with it in a way,” he added.

Mr. Cronenberg began writing The Shrouds as a tribute to his wife of more than four decades after she died in 2017.

Vincent Cassel stars as Karsh, a widower who has created a technology that allows relatives to watch their loved one decompose in the grave after his own wife died of cancer.

His dead wife, played by Diane Kruger, comes to him as a vision when he observes her body from an app. He notices strange growths on the body, kicking off a search for answers joined by his conspiracy-aroused sister-in-law, also portrayed by Ms. Kruger, and her paranoid ex-husband, played by Guy Pearce.

Mr. Cronenberg said that The Shrouds may not be the most approachable film in how it handles the topic of life and death. “People who are used to, you know, normal TV or streaming series and stuff might find the approach to life in this film to be unusual and edgy, and I accept that,” said Mr. Cronenberg.

“I mean, most of my films have had that, you know, tone.”

Critics were disappointed, with entertainment news website Deadline writing: “Whatever else you may expect of Cronenberg as a distinctive auteur — wry humor, a measured pace, exultant wallowing in foul goo — you’re not expecting the narrative to explode into bits. That really is a new kind of ick.”

RYOO’S VETERAN SEQUEL
Nine years after his box office hit Veteran, South Korean filmmaker Ryoo Seung-wan is bringing the Violent Crime Investigation Division back to the big screen with Veteran 2.

The action-thriller, which also goes by the title I, the Executioner and stars Hwang Jung-min and Jung Hae-in, had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where it is showing out of competition, shortly after midnight on Tuesday.

Veteran actor Mr. Hwang, 53, one of Korea’s highest-paid movie stars, reprises the role of detective Seo Do-cheol in the new film while Snowdrop and Something in the Rain star Mr. Jung, 36, takes on the role of mysterious rookie police officer Park Sun-woo, who is brought in to help catch a serial killer targeting criminals.

Complicating the investigators’ work is an increasing number of social media influencers who livestream from crime scenes in the hope of gaining clicks, likes, and new followers.

“There are a lot of events happening right now, not only in Korea, but all over the world, that involve fake news, situations where information is oversaturated, where there is confusion about what is true, and I thought I would take those things and try to merge them together,” said Mr. Ryoo.

Detective Seo and his squad are overworked and underpaid, with high gas prices biting particularly hard — something audiences can relate to, said Mr. Ryoo, who wrote both films.

He also promised that audiences would not be disappointed by the new film’s action scenes. “I wanted to make sure that when the audience watches the movie, they feel like they’re seeing these type of action scenes for the first time,” he said.

The most important part is making sure audiences love the film enough that a third instalment can be made, he said.

However: “Nothing has been decided yet, apart from our will to make another movie,” he said, promising that it would take less than nine years this time to deliver a third film.

ANORA TO DESTIGMATIZE SEX WORK
Part of director Sean Baker’s aim in making Anora, a darkly funny and touching drama about a young exotic dancer who becomes involved with a Russian oligarch’s son, was to remove the stigma surrounding sex work, he said on Wednesday.

“It’s important to explore what sex work is in the modern age,” Mr. Baker told journalists at the Cannes Film Festival, where the competition film premiered on Tuesday. “It’s a career and job that should be respected. In my opinion — de criminalized — it’s up to them to decide.”

Mr. Baker said he was introduced to the adult film world while doing research for 2012’s Starlet.

“There’s a million stories to be told in that world,” he said.

Anora continues a streak of sex worker-focused films by Mr. Baker, including the 2021 Cannes entry Red Rocket and 2017’s The Florida Project, that he has no plans of stopping.

“We’ve already been talking about the next one, and it involves a sex worker. So let’s see what happens,” he said.

Anora stars Mikey Madison as the titular character, who meets Vanya, the immature son of a Russian oligarch with seemingly unlimited money, while working at a strip club. Vanya, played by Mark Eydelshteyn, hires Anora to be his girlfriend for a week, deciding on a whim to take his private plane to party in Las Vegas, where they get married. That decision upsets his disapproving parents so much that they jet over from Russia to ensure he gets an annulment.

Reviews were positive, with The Guardian newspaper giving the “stellar” film four out of five stars and The Hollywood Reporter calling it “a very satisfying watch, deftly commenting on questions of class, privilege, and the wealth divide.”

Shooting the sex scenes was a collaborative process that involved the actors’ input, said Madison, who opted not to use an intimacy coordinator or bring in a stunt double.

“Those scenes were fun to shoot and all of the lap dance scenes were very fun to shoot as well,” Madison said.

Mr. Baker said he would support an actor’s decision to use an intimacy coordinator — who helps choreograph TV and movie scenes involving sex or nudity and ensures actors are not exploited — but was comfortable directing a sex scene without one.

“Our number one priority is to keep our actors safe, protected, comfortable, and involved in the process,” he said. — Reuters