Cannes often awards the right filmmakers. However, mostly when they have passed their zenith.
Director Ruben Östlund (right) and his actors Woody Harrelson, Vicki Berlin and Jean-Christophe Folly celebrate in Cannes.
Aside from the red carpet and the elegant, and at times baroque, fashion shows that take place in front of the Palais, the Cannes Film Festival has a reputation for showing productions of enough quality to set the pace for the following film year. In the best case, works can be seen that also realign perception with their staging – this year Albert Serra’s nonchalant thriller “Pacifiction”, set in French Polynesia, managed the small miracle of entering new aesthetic territory.
With “Triangle of Sadness” by Swedish director Ruben Östlund, who again won the Palme d’Or after the art satire “The Square” (2017), a film was crowned that in many ways embodies the opposite. The swan song to capitalism, as celebrated by Östlund, is efficiently staged, but the mechanics of the script, which leaves a success-spoiled influencer couple stranded penniless and powerless on an island after a cruise, leaves no room for the imagination.
What is more irritating than the naturalistic illustration of the storm-related digestive disorders, however, is the misanthropic drawing of the figures and the pomp with which the post-Marxist analysis of society is offered to the public here. The crashing film “shocked” the jury, said President Vincent Lindon; however, one wonders whether the festival’s highest accolade would not have been more appropriate for a more subtle production.
Between attraction and the desire to escape
On the other hand, the director’s prize that the South Korean Park Chan Wook received for “Decision to Leave” is understandable. The masterfully staged variation of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” traces the love story between a charismatic police officer and a young widow whose relationship oscillates between magnetic attraction and the desire to flee.
The “Grand Prize”, which was awarded ex aequo to Lukas Dhont’s “Close” and Claire Denis’ “Stars at Noon”, primarily testifies to the diversity of this year’s offer: while the Danish filmmaker already five years ago with the for The «Caméra d’Or» awarded to «Girl» attracted the attention of the festival and proves thematic consistency here with its sensitive study of adolescence, the French director’s innovative style of directing was ignored for decades in Cannes. The award for her sensitive, if at times somewhat narcissistic political thriller is not surprising, even if one cannot shake the suspicion that the jury wanted to use the prize to honor her more personal productions such as “Beau travail” and “35 rhums”.
The jury prize shared by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s “Le Otto Montagne” and Jerzy Skolimowski’s “EO” is also based on complementarity. While the Belgian directing couple traces a friendship in a paradisiacal mountain landscape in a conventional manner, the Polish veteran follows the ordeal of a donkey in a much more innovative style.
The Actor Awards, which went to Iranian Tsar Amir Ebrahimi for Holy Spider and Song Kang Ho for Kore-eda’s adoption drama Broker, reflect the central place that South Korea and the Middle East occupy on the cinematic map; the screenplay prize that honored Tarik Saleh’s “Boy from Heaven” also suggests that the jury was also sensitive to the aftershocks of the Arab Spring.
Lively Swiss contributions
Was it necessary to offer a “special prize” to the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who have already won two Golden Palms and a “Grand Prix” from Cannes? “Tori et Lokita”, her drama about two African immigrants, shows empathy, but the jury could have highlighted more surprising productions: “Nostalgia” by Mario Martone pays a glowing homage to his hometown of Naples, Kirill Serebrennikov offers one in “Tchaikovsky’s Wife”. clinical study of alienation. Cannes often awards the right filmmakers, but usually when they have passed their creative peak.
The Spanish director Elena López Riera, who presented her first feature film, a Swiss-Spanish-French co-production, in the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, also went away empty-handed. Her magically realistic drama stood out in the side series just as much as the documentary “De humani corporis fabrica”: In this French-Swiss-American co-production by Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (“Leviathan”), the camera immerses itself in the human body , plumbs his insides. A body horror against which even that of the specialist David Cronenberg, who contributed the most notable competition entry with “Crimes of the Future”, looked bloodless.
Assistance: Andreas Scheiner