In the twelve months since I was last in Cannes, I forgot the difference between “real” Festival screenings, and Marche (market) screenings. Everyone talks about the rigorous rules of Cannes festival screenings — the ceremony of lining up; the draconian stratification of press badges, in which your relative importance is proscribed by the color of the plastic ID card around your neck; the near-ritual standing ovations. What people generally don’t bother talking about, and I had forgotten, is the diametrically opposed informality of the market: the fact that lining up is only required for the hottest tickets (usually those that have already screened once in the festival); that most films play to mostly empty rooms, with badgeholders drifting in and out throughout; and that sometimes things happen that defy any attempt to trainspot the schedule to carefully.

So I arrived at the Star for the 9:45 screening of Kore-eda’s Air Doll twenty minutes early, not realizing that at 9:30, the lights would go down and I’d get a surprise glimpse at a 10-minute extended trailer for Gainsbourg, Je t’aime moi non plus (that, at least, was the title flashed at the end; IMDB calls it, Serge Gainsbourg, vie héroïque), written and directed by French graphic novelist Joann Sfar.

It took a few minutes to realize what it was we were looking at — I was one of many in the theater who got up and walked out, assuming I was in the wrong screening room, but when the Cannes employee at the door told me the Kore-eda film would show on that same screen at 9:45, I went back inside. From what I could piece together from the remaining 7 minutes, Gainsbourg is a magical-realist tour through the French pop icon’s erotic adventures. Eric Elmosnino plays Gainsbourg, and by all appearances is convincing at it; Bridget Bardot is played by Laetitia Casta, in short-shorts and thigh high boots when she’s wearing anything at all (which, the trailer would indicate, is not often); British actress Lucy Gordon is Jane Birkin, introduced as young and petulant and last glimpsed as a matronly shrew. There was a brief glimpse of an actress playing a teenaged Charlotte Gainsbourg, but I didn’t recognize her and she’s not listed on IMDB.

It certainly would not be beyond the realm of possibility if the producers had put all the sex in the film in the show reel, thereby offering a skewed sense of what the finished product will look like, but the overall tone of the trailer was classy Euro art softcore, with a touch of cartoon whimsy. There’s a recurring character with the head of a giant-nosed animal, who at one point seemed to be Gainsbourg’s sidekick, at another a servant, and at another Gainsbourg himself. It all seems very … cool.

The opposite, then, of the Kore-eda. There’s nothing less cool these days than calculated quirk, and Air Doll’s synopsis — “a sad yet happy fantasy” about a blow-up sex doll  who miraculously “found a heart” and struggles to use it in concert with her permanently parted lips, air valve and removable vagina — seemed to fit that description. Certainly, Air Doll hits all the trite notes of the modern cinema of urban loneliness — the twinkle-sad score, the opening shot of its ostensible protagonist sulking in the harsh light of a commuter train — and certainly for the first hour at least, it bears the stain of standard-issue Amerindie clap-trap about a lonely world made better by childlike wonder. But from the start, it’s also weirder than it sounds, and more unsettling; then, in its second half, when the childlike wonder sours into adolescent-esque entitlement, it gets a lot weirder.

Air Doll is certainly way overlong and sometimes indulgent, but it would be a lot easier to dismiss if Kore-eda’s platitudinous lament for the loss of collective soul didn’t, as a side effect,  movingly speak to fundamental conflicts between sexes, to outdated gender roles that persist to spark frustrations in urban North American life and must be much more prevalent in Japan, in which standard issue porn is dominated by images of alleged schoolgirls.  It’s one thing to roll eyes at the suggestion that our lives would be better if people still cared about poetry, but as Kore-eda’s plastic protagonist curiously explores the world outside her master’s bed, she slowly goes through the stages of carving out her an adult identity: first through consumerism, then through discovering physical pleasure, then through love and ultimately via the realization that her actions have consequences. At that point, her mantra about being “just a substitute” no longer applies. There is a inventively rendered if rudimentary feminist allegory here that works if you let it.

Is creating a vague empowerment fable around the plight of a sex doll who suddenly attains agency over her body a criminally overwrought way to make the not-new argument that it sucks when men expect women to adopt the docile dependence of children even as they’re sexualizing them like adults? Maybe, but it’s effective, and certainly the gender-focused read allows Air Doll to succeed as social commentary, where the grating “we are all hollow” sermonizing mostly fails. And really — as long as there are dudes whose preferred woman lies there and takes it without asserting any personality of her own, isn’t this a message that bears repeating? That the film ultimately resolves itself in a final, violent twist of a sick joke is kind of fascinating. If it’s possible for twee and tasteless to go hand in hand, this is what it looks like.

Both the Gainsbroug film and the Kore-eda drag real sexual hangups and obsessions into the realm of fantasy. Who knows what Sfar’s film will eventually look like, but the trailer, at least, successfully seduces with cynicism. Kore-da’s film doesn’t always succeed in its attempt to transcend cynicism, but the full-on committment to sincerity is hard to dismiss.