We wondered if the jury, chaired by a young director and composed of leading actors of a new generation (Omar Sy, Pierfrancesco Favino, Eva Green, Lily Gladstone), would have the courage to reward artists not yet recognized but who have given a little relief to a competition having shown many films which had little to do there without offering a real cinematic shock. We were not disappointed: by giving the Palme d’Or to Sean Baker for Anorait highlights the talent of an American author with a short filmography (Tangerine, The Florida Project) which composes a realistic and deeply human auteur cinema.
Greta Gerwig greeted a “ magnificent film, full of humanity and hope, which broke our hearts », and it is true that in the middle of feature films which have (too) often favored visual effects rather than the impulses of the heart, the destiny of a young prostitute who becomes the exclusive girlfriend of a young Russian oligarch extremely rich provokes great emotions. There’s a bit of the Coen brothers in this disenchanted version of Pretty Woman whose heroine does not want to give in to the violence of the men who buy her body but to whom she does not sell her soul.
The Grand Prize rewards a young Indian filmmaker, Payal Kapadia, 38, who is taking her first big steps internationally with All We Imagine as Light, the intersecting portraits of two women roommates in Mumbai, who wish to be free and independent. If the rhythm is contemplative, the story is poignant and transgressive, with scenes of love and nudity that we do not see in traditional Bollywood cinema. She is also a director with a promising universe who received the Screenplay Prize: Coralie Fargeat, 48, made a strong impression with The Substance, the story of a fading star (astonishing Demi Moore) who, after being kicked off a TV show because she’s too old, decides to inject herself with a strange product to create a younger version of herself . Like Julia Ducournau, Palme d’Or three years ago for Titanium, the Frenchwoman offers the best of horror with this extremely creative mise en abyme in the image and staging. And who would have deserved a reward more worthy of his qualities…
Excluded from the list are the filmmakers of the old guard, Francis Ford Coppola, Paolo Sorrentino and David Cronenberg, who presented boring films that were no longer really in touch with the realities of our time! We will not include in this list Jacques Audiard, 72 years old, a veteran of the festival with several films in competition, a number of which won awards: one of the gifted talents of French cinema has always known how to reinvent himself to offer works that are as different as they are surprising. With Emilia Perez, his fourth award at Cannes and his first Jury Prize, he signs a musical thriller as visually masterful as it is wonderfully performed by his band of actresses, led by Karla Sofía Gascon, Zoe Saldana and Selena Gomez. Who well deserve their collective interpretation prize.
We wondered if the jury would have the courage to reward artists not yet recognized
Women, in front of and behind the camera, often mistreated but always combative, are in the spotlight of an edition which denounced the violence to which they are victims everywhere. Without activism, just because they are worth it. Geopolitical conflicts also played the leading roles in the great Cannes film. But how can Nadine Labaki give as the only justification for awarding the Special Jury Prize to Mohammad Rasoulof the denunciation of the regime of terror in Iran? In “ voluntary exile » in Germany after a sentence of eight years in prison, the author of Seeds of the wild fig tree would have well deserved a Palme d’Or for this film which is as moving as much by the power and intelligence of its staging as by the drama experienced by Iranians taken hostage by the dictatorship.
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Because we do not receive films in the same way and we therefore judge them differently, we may be surprised by the Director’s Prize awarded to the Portuguese Miguel Gomez for Grand Tourdaring but boring, of the Male Actor Prize to Jesse Plemmons, a talented American actor but in a failed work (Kinds of Kindness by Yorgos Lanthimos), while the performers of The Apprentice, by Ali Abbasi, about the beginnings of Donald Trump, impressed. But Cannes wouldn’t be Cannes if everyone was happy…
