Cannes celebrates ‘Mission: Impossible’, a global franchise with a French connection

After a politically charged opening day dominated by Trump, Gaza and the demise of Gérard Depardieu, the Cannes Film Festival ramped up adrenaline levels on Wednesday with the premiere of episode eight in the “Mission: Impossible” saga – potentially the final one in Tom Cruise’s high-octane franchise. 

Cruise’s return to Cannes marks an early highlight for the festival, three years after he triumphed here with his long-awaited Top Gun sequel, in a winning formula that propelled “Maverick” to $1.49 billion at the global box office. 

Ahead of the premiere, the 62-year-old actor joined director Christopher McQuarrie and the cast for a photo session as fans angled for a glimpse of the Hollywood star, bringing much of the activity at the Palais des Festivals to a standstill. 

Dangling in the air opposite the Palais, window cleaners were busy polishing the gleaming facade of a Prada boutique, a spectacle of ropes, buckets and sponges worthy of Cruise’s all-action hero Ethan Hunt. 

“Tom Cruise climbed up the world’s tallest tower – that takes some beating,” joked one of the workers, referencing an iconic scene atop the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, from the fourth instalment in the “Mission: Impossible” saga. 

Cruise, who has hardly grown a wrinkle in three decades of playing Ethan Hunt, has been sharing footage of his latest stunts in the run-up to the premiere, including jumping from a helicopter at 10,000 feet over a South African mountain range and performing a high-speed spin with a camera strapped to his stomach.  

From Béart to Seydoux 

Partly shot in London studios, the latest “Mission: Impossible” takes viewers to Ukraine, Hungary, Austria, Cuba, China, India and the Bering Sea – enough to question the feasibility of US President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on film “produced in Foreign Lands”, which have thrown a wet blanket over the film world’s annual Riviera gathering.  

The film also takes viewers back to France, continuing a French connection that has been a mainstay of the action-packed franchise ever since Jean Reno and Emmanuelle Béart teamed up with Cruise in the 1996 original.   

“Reno’s turn as the good guy who turns on Hunt was terrific, the kind that stays with you,” said festival-goer Benoît, waiting on the palm tree-lined Croisette ahead of Wednesday’s premiere. “You never saw French actors in big Hollywood roles before.”

Director Brian De Palma, who regarded his “Mission: Impossible” as a career peak, reportedly insisted on the French duo having prominent parts, then still a rarity for an American blockbuster. While Reno had the global success of “Léon” under his belt, the choice of Béart, a star of French arthouse cinema, raised eyebrows in Hollywood. She later recalled having to improvise an attack on Cruise during casting, pinning him up against a wall with a gun to his head, and how her performance won over the producers.  

Since then, other French actors have jumped onboard, including Léa Seydoux as a formidable double agent in the fourth instalment, “Ghost Protocol” (2011), Alix Bénézech as a policewoman in the sixth, “Fallout” (2018), and finally Pom Klementieff as the fearsome killer Paris from “Dead reckoning” (2023) and the last episode. 

Paris tribute 

France itself has been slower to feature in the saga. Despite boarding a Paris-bound high-speed train for a pulsating finale, Ethan Hunt never actually makes it to France in the first “Mission: Impossible”. The Eiffel Tower makes a fleeting appearance in episode five, “Rogue Nation” (2015), but it’s only the follow-up, “Fallout”, that really spotlights the French capital. 

That episode takes the all-action hero on a motorbike chase around the Arc de Triomphe, a parachute drop over the Grand Palais and a boat chase on the Seine as he scrambles to prevent a terrorist group from acquiring plutonium to develop nuclear weapons. It took 36 days of filming in the heart of Paris – and a reported 35 million euros in production costs – to pull off all the stunts. 

Director Christopher McQuarrie said he wanted to send a message of support to France and its capital in the wake of the November 13, 2015, terrorist attacks that brought carnage to the streets of Paris. When the film premiered in the French capital, McQuarrie said producers had expressed reservations about the location’s safety. “Tom said, ‘That’s exactly why we are going there, to show the world that it is safe’,” the director recalled. 

The Arc de Triomphe chase, the film's most emblematic scene, was also intended as a tribute to Claude Lelouch’s legendary 1976 short film “C'était un rendez-vous” (“It was a date”), in which a car speeds through Paris in a breathless sequence shot, with no special effects. 

Belmondo, the Gallic ‘proto-Cruise’ 

Cruise’s hair-raising exploits on screen have long elicited comparisons with the late French film legend Jean-Paul Belmondo, an early icon of the Nouvelle Vague who gradually moved into the daring action movies for which he is best remembered in France today.  

Bébel, as Belmondo was known, was recently described by the BBC as a “proto-Cruise” owing to his physical prowess and fearless stunt work. The two shared a similar passion for the movies, committing body and soul to their parts, and avoiding stunt doubles as much as possible. 

Last year, when pictures of Cruise standing on the promenade Belmondo in Paris spread on social media, many wondered whether the next “Mission: Impossible” would include a tribute to Bébel.  

Cruise was in fact rehearsing his daredevil stunt ahead of the Paris Olympics closing ceremony, which saw him channel his inner Ethan Hunt as he jumped off the stadium roof to collect the Olympic flag, ride off on his motorcycle and then skydive into Los Angeles, to the “Mission: Impossible” theme song. 

This article was adapted from the French original by Benjamin Dodman.

.