These were the prizes for a Cannes under pressure. The Hollywood A-listers and big-hitters were A-listing and big-hitting at home this year. And what about the international heavyweights from Europe and Asia that highbrow festivaliers are always saying are loads better than the Americans anyway? Well, many of those only showed up in the physical sense. For me, most of the films from the accepted laureates and auteurs were very moderate and I have to confess being sceptical about this year’s Palme d’Or: Fjord, by Romanian film-maker Cristian Mungiu (who won the Palme nearly 20 years ago with his searing abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days).
Fjord in fact is a perfect example of an established European star director using a big Hollywood name: Sebastian Stan, playing a grumpy and religious Romanian IT engineer, his hair shaved into dull male pattern baldness for the part, and photographed largely in austere longshot.
The point of Fjord is arguably to focus on a very valid theme that Mungiu has explored before: the painful cultural differences within Europe, something we may naively consider to be a unitary EU bloc. In the film we see liberal-interventionist Norway getting involved in private family affairs in a way that might not happen in Romania, and the two main characters’ fundamentalist Christian faith is held against them in this secular-humanist environment. Fjord has the director’s procedural mannerisms but here they do not do real work in illuminating any very interesting truth; Fjord feels like a coproduction contrivance, but certainly one that impressed this jury.
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, his stunning Russian parable of Putinesque violence, denial and delusion, was my pick for the Palme – substantial, clear-sighted, magnificently acted and shot. The personal is fused with the political in a thrilling way and it has at least won the runner-up Grand Prix. The third place jury prize for Valeska Grisebach’s elusive and complex The Dreamed Adventure, about a Bulgarian archaeologist confronting the abuses of the past in the Balkans, is an interesting and valuable choice. It was a film from a director whose enigmatic, unconventional storytelling and scene-setting I have admired in the past, but for me was not her best work. Yet this prize makes me want to go back and revisit the movie.
Pawel Pawlikowski’s outstanding novella-sized movie Fatherland won him (jointly) the best director prize, a gripping picture of Nobel laureate Thomas Mann returning from his California exile after the second world war to visit Germany in the angry company of his daughter Erika. Pawlikowski got great performances from his leads, Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller. I was also delighted to see best screenplay go to Emmanuel Marre’s outstanding film Notre Salut, the complex, poignant story of Henri Marre, the director’s great-grandfather, who was a minor functionary in the Vichy collaborationist zone after the fall of France to Nazi Germany.
The best actress awards, going jointly to Tao Okamoto and Virginie Efira for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s film All of a Sudden, is something else about this year’s Cannes that fills me with something less than enthusiasm. This is the faintly preposterous story of a French care home supervisor who finds an intense connection with a Japanese stage director, and these performers did an impeccable job: Okamoto elegant and restrained, Efira more overtly emotional. But the saucer-eyed praise in Cannes for this film and its middlebrow high concept left me cold. The film was most persuasive and moving in simply depicting the more unshowy business of caring for old people.
Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi won the director prize (jointly with Pawlikowski) for their extravagant, multistranded and very absorbing queer panorama The Black Ball, derived from Lorca, and the best actor prize went jointly to Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne, the male leads of Lukas Dhont’s Coward, playing two Belgian soldiers in the first world war who fall in love. While gay themes, particularly movies that were about retrieving gay experience which has been erased by history, resonated with this year’s jury, I wondered whether Coward was really offering contemporary audiences the shock of the new – but the performances were undoubtedly vehement and even passionate.
For me, Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur and Pawlikowski’s Fatherland are the main highlights of this year’s prize ceremony, but Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure may now find a growing band of admirers.
