Summer of Scarlett

It’s a busy week for Scarlett Johansson. Fresh off hosting the final episode of Saturday Night Live’s 50th season—and maybe her husband’s last season?—she popped up in Cannes for the premiere of her feature directorial debut, Eleanor the Great. 

The film stars June Squibb and Erin Kellyman, and it got a very warm reception at Cannes, which isn’t exactly unusual, that’s a very friendly audience. Still, expect ScarJo and Eleanor the Great to get a big push later this year during award season. The June Squibb Oscar run begins now!

ScarJo missed the premiere of The Phoenician Scheme over the weekend because of SNL, but it makes more sense to save her big Cannes moment for her directorial debut. She’s not the star of The Phoenician Scheme, and while she doesn’t appear in Eleanor, it is headline news that it’s her directorial debut. She was front and center at Cannes alongside June Squibb and Erin Kellyman.

The film premiered outside the main competition, so it didn’t have a gala premiere, and Scarlett kept it simple and sleek for the occasion in a plain black Prada dress. I have never been totally on board with ScarJo’s style, but I think “simple” is her best mode. This is a good look top to toe.

She wore Prada again to the gala premiere of Vie Privée (A Private Life), in a romantic periwinkle dress. 

This is less successful. As is usually the case with ScarJo, the head styling is wrong. You can see she kept the same basic styling from earlier, and probably had to, assuming a time crunch between the two premieres, but the red lip is too harsh for the pastel dress, and she always does these severe hairstyles that almost never work with the dress she’s wearing. The slicked-back hair worked with the black dress, but not at all with this one. This is a soft, floaty dress, it needs luscious waves or maybe a loose braid. She’s one of the most beautiful women in the world but her styling is always that little bit wrong.

She’ll have plenty of chances for a do-over, though. It’s going to be a huge summer for Scarlett, with Jurassic World: Rebirth coming in time for the long July 4th weekend in the US. A new trailer dropped yesterday.

 

One of the superhero movies could always surprise us, but right now, I think Rebirth might be the movie of the summer. Book nerds are excited because it includes stuff from Michael Crichton’s original book that haven’t made it into the movies yet—like trying to raft past a T-Rex—and I keep hearing normal people talk about this movie offline, more than any other summer movie except Lilo & Stitch. Marvel made ScarJo one of the most powerful—and highest paid—actors in the 2010s. But you know what a real power move would be? Proving she has that kind of box office clout without the Avengers.