When the lights came up after the world premiere of The Man I Love at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, the audience applauded for eight uninterrupted minutes. Rami Malek stood on the Palais des Festivals stage and cried. It was one of those Cannes moments that cuts through the noise of a festival week, the kind that has nothing to do with marketing or positioning, and everything to do with what just happened on screen. The film is one of only two American features competing for the Palme d’Or this year, the other being James Gray’s Paper Tiger. After Wednesday night, it is firmly in the conversation.
The Film
Directed by Ira Sachs and co-written with Mauricio Zacharias, The Man I Love is set in downtown New York in the late 1980s during the AIDS crisis. Malek plays Jimmy George, a beloved queer entertainer living with AIDS who refuses to stop working, determined to mount a new theatrical production as time runs short. His world is anchored by his devoted partner Dennis, played by Tom Sturridge, and complicated by a simmering affair with a younger neighbour, Vincent, played by Luther Ford in a beguiling feature-film debut. Rebecca Hall and Ebon Moss-Bachrach co-starred, though neither attended the premiere.
The film marks Sachs’ return to the Cannes competition after his 2019 drama Frankie. For Malek, it is his first time headlining a Cannes competition film, and by all accounts, he arrived ready. One of the film’s most talked-about sequences has him mournfully singing Melanie’s 1970 B-side, “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma,” to his family, a scene that critics are already calling a genuine showstopper.
The Egyptian in the Room
The significance of this moment carries extra weight. Malek, the first Egyptian actor to win the Best Actor Oscar, said ahead of the premiere that Cannes holds a particular meaning because of where his family is from. “It’s one of the greatest achievements because of the hope it’s imbued in so many people all over the world, especially where my family is from in Egypt,” he said. “All over the world, people can relate to what it feels like to be an immigrant.”
Eight minutes of applause is Cannes’ way of saying it heard him.
