With Asteroid City, Wes Anderson remains the purveyor of stars at the Cannes Film Festival

He has always returned empty-handed from the Croisette, although he has each time raised the temperature on the Cannes red carpet, bringing in his wake a group of Hollywood big names. For the third time in his career, dreamlike director Wes Anderson is in the running for the Palme d'Or. The author of The Grand Budapest Hotel and Aboard Darjeeling Limited presents Asteroid City in competition on Tuesday.

As in The French Dispatch which had seen Timothée Chalamet, Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson and Lyna Khoudri panicking photographers and autograph hunters, Asteroid City, which was shot in Spain, brings together a most glamorous cast: the filmmaker's faithful Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody and Jeff Goldblum, and newcomers like Margot Robbie, Tom Hanks, Maya Hawke and Scarlett Johansson...

Back in competition two years after The French Dispatch, which took place in a postcard France, the 54-year-old Texan, known for his old-fashioned and ironic style, this time places his action in Fifties America. In a fictional small desert town famous for its gigantic meteorite crater and nearby astronomical observatory, soldiers and astronomers welcome five gifted children, distinguished for their scientific creations, for a weekend, so that they present their inventions to their parents.

A few miles away, over the hills, loom mushroom clouds caused by nuclear testing. These will not be the only unexpected events that will punctuate this retro and pastel tale, which will be released in French theaters on June 26. Extra-terrestrials could invite themselves to the party.

Wes Anderson offers instantly recognizable cinema, with a retro visual palette and a taste for symmetry, often imitated, which delights his fans on Instagram. It remains to be seen whether it will succeed in renewing itself and seducing the jury chaired by Ruben Östlund, who has already seen more than half of the 21 works in the running.

Wes Anderson will perhaps be eclipsed by the maestro of transalpine cinema. Distinguished in 2021 with an honorary Palme d'Or, Marco Bellocchio, 83, reveals The Abduction. The true story of Edgardo Mortara, a 6-year-old Jewish child who was forcibly converted in the 19th century. The film is set in the Jewish quarter of Bologna where in 1858, the Pope's soldiers burst into the Mortara family's home to take their 7-year-old son, Edgardo, who will receive a Catholic education.

Will the veteran finally know the consecration, while the transalpine cinema has not been crowned with a palme d'or for more than 20 years? The coveted trophy has always eluded him despite his eight selections from The Leap into the Void in 1980, to the Traitor in 2019, on a repentant from the mafia.

Italy will have two more chances to win the prize. On the one hand, with Nanni Moretti, crowned in 2001 for La Chambre du fils and who returns on Wednesday with Vers un avenir radiant. On the other hand, with Alice Rohrwacher, another Cannes regular, who follows a young archaeologist mixed up with a group of grave robbers in 1980s Italy in La chimère screened on Friday.