Cannes 2024. American Sean Baker wins the Palme d’Or for “Anora”, a tribute to sex workers.

We were waiting for the Iranian Mohammad Rasoulof, it was Sean Baker, a figure of American independent cinema, who won the Palme d’Or. It has been 13 years, since Terence Malick in 2011, that an American has not obtained the supreme award. With Anora, the 53-year-old director for whom this is the first selection in competition, offers a dive into the world of sex workers, between comedy and social realism. Actress Mikey Madison, who would not have stolen the acting prize, plays an erotic dancer who tries to escape her condition by marrying the son of a Russian oligarch. Sean Baker, who recalled the need to see films in theaters and paid tribute to Francis Ford Coppola and David Cronenberg, who were also in competition and left empty-handed, dedicated his prize to “all sex workers, from the past, of the present and the future.” A great favorite of the press and greeted on Friday by a thirteen-minute standing ovation, Mohammad Rasoulof, who left his country clandestinely where he is sentenced to eight years in prison, won a special jury prize, created for the occasion. A disappointing choice considering the power and control ofThe seeds of the wild fig treerelentless description of the workings of the Iranian totalitarian regime through the daily life of a family during the emergence of the Women, Life, Freedom movement.

By reducing Rasoulof and three of his actors and actresses, present in the room, to a symbol, Greta Gerwig’s jury did not take into account his immense qualities as a filmmaker nor the protection that a palm prize could have constituted. gold with regard to the Iranian regime. “Allow me to spare a thought for all the members of my team who are not with me, held in Iran and under pressure from the secret services of the Islamic Republic,” recalled Mohammad Rasoulof, paying tribute to the convicted rapper Toomaj Salehj to death for supporting the Women’s Life and Freedom movement.

“Emilia Perez”, the gender transition of a drug lord

In this ecumenical list, the female performance prize is awarded collectively to the actresses ofEmilia Perez, a musical comedy by Jacques Audiard (which also received the jury prize) about the gender transition of a Mexican drug lord. Very moved, the Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón, who plays the main role, spoke on behalf of all trans people targeted by hate messages: “all of you who have made us suffer so much, it is important that you change”. We will also salute the Grand Prize, awarded to the Indian Payal Kapadia for All we imagine as light, the portrait of two young women from Mumbai, who try to find their way despite social and family injunctions. “This is the first Indian film in competition for thirty years,” recalled the filmmaker.

Exit Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Schrader and David Cronenberg

If we add the screenplay prize awarded to the French Coralie Fargeat for The Substance, a horrific fable about a fifty-year-old woman disembarked from television overnight because of her age, it seems that Greta Gerwich’s jury wanted to highlight women, minorities and struggles, to reward a new generation of filmmakers. Exit Francis Ford Coppola (who still came to present the palm of honor to his friend George Lucas), Paul Schrader, David Cronenberg. Apart from the grandiloquent films, the demonstrative and even virilistic stagings which punctuated the selection. Nothing for the brilliant Russian Kirill Serebrennikov whose breathtaking production does not erase a morbid fascination for his troubled character, the writer Edouard Limonov, and painful scenes of domestic violence. Nothing either for the Frenchman Gilles Lellouche and his transclass romance which leers towards Scorsese with the subtlety of a digger. Nor for the Italian Paolo Sorrentino who embodies the “male gaze” to the point of caricature with Parthenope, a long advertising clip produced by Saint-Laurent where he lets loose his fantasies about the bodies of young women. As if the jury of this 77th festival had wanted to correct the faults of a weak selection, largely dominated by men (18 out of 22 films) and problematic representations of women and their bodies. For an Emilia Perez (the character, not the film) how many women are mishandled, stitched (at Cronenberg), eviscerated (at Lanthimos), locked in a determinism that leaves them no way out? “We need a revolution and I don’t think it has started yet,” said Coralie Fargeat when receiving her prize. Not sure that the message of his film – to get out of submission and destroy the patriarchy, let’s become monsters – is the right way to start this revolution but the change will certainly come through the question of the gaze and representations.