The star of Top Gun: Maverick was in high spirits as he walked the red carpet to the Cannes Festival Palace.

At the barrier in front of the palace, Tom Cruise had patiently signed dozens of autographs for the fans who had been waiting for hours, then he had lined up with his producers, director Joe Kosinski and his co-star Jennifer Connelly in front of the stairs and bathed in the flashbulbs of the photographers.

Thierry Frémaux, the program director at Cannes, greeted him at the top like an old friend.

Then the real show began.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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The Patrouille de France, the French Air Force's aerobatic team, made two laps over the Bay of Cannes, each time painting a fluffy tricolor in the air with their Alpha Jets.

Inside the auditorium, only a ten-minute compilation of highlights from Cruise's forty-year film career was shown.

And then he was presented with the Palm of Honor of the 75th Cannes Film Festival.

On the Croisette they just know how to do that.

Two hours earlier Tom Cruise had given an account of his profession and vocation in front of a thousand spectators in the Salle Debussy, the festival's second largest cinema hall, and it was once again possible to see how a Hollywood star works.

He didn't babble, he didn't politicize;

instead, he shared how at the end of each day's shooting, Harold Becker, who directed the film The Cadets from Bunker Hill, in which he had his first major role, would show him the patterns while learning how to be in front of the camera had to act.

Or how he preferred to postpone the start date of "Top Gun: Maverick" for three years rather than release the film on a streaming platform.

In other words, he played by the rules of Cannes, where even the icons of the film industry are expected to make a commitment to cinema as an art and a way of life.

When asked why he still does most of his own stunts, he replied with a question: "Would you have asked Gene Kelly why he dances?"

An enviable stunt

The film with which he came to Cannes, the sequel to "Top Gun" from 1986, was a purely industrial product, a highly motorized audiovisual amusement machine made up of male and female clichés, flight stunts and martial posturing, soundtrack boom and advertising aesthetics.

Thirty-six years ago, when Cruise first flew for the US Navy, the enemy with their MiG jets was still clearly recognizable as a Soviet combat unit.

Today one wonders whether Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer shouldn't have waited a few more years to produce it.

Meanwhile, in the Ukraine war, both sides fly MiGs, while the anti-aircraft systems come from all sorts of arsenals.

The principle of the "high concept" that "Top Gun" comes from is the greatest narrative simplification combined with extreme technical upgrades, which in "Maverick" leads to the fact that an unspecified rogue state with military superpowers serves as the enemy.

But the world situation is becoming more differentiated and complicated every day.

The woodcut-like dramaturgy of "Top Gun" seems even more antiquated than the remake of a film from the eighties has to be anyway.

In the last scene, by the way, Cruise takes to the skies over California in a P-51 Mustang, a WWII propeller plane – and I actually envied him that stunt.

Small groups of heavily armed police officers were standing outside the cinema, from which people in tuxedos and evening dresses were pouring.

The whole Croisette was parked with police cars.

The assassination attempt in Nice also left its mark here.

This is no longer the Europe of the 1980s, but a new, restless world.