The Square wins Palme d’Or
Sofia Coppola named best director, Kidman scores special prize at Cannes
Swedish director Ruben Östlund won the 2017 Palme d’Or for his film The Square at the 70th edition of the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday night. His previous film, Force Majeure, had taken the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard sidebar when it played here in 2014. The Square tells the story of an art gallery director whose behaviour over a stolen cellphone creates societal ripples.
And while the under representation of female directors continues to be an issue at the festival, the few who were here were well rewarded by the jury headed by Pedro Almodóvar. Although only three of the 19 competition films were directed by women, two of those picked up prizes.
Sofia Coppola was named best director for The Beguiled, about an all-girls school that receives an unwelcome visitor during the Civil War. She is only the second woman to win that prize, after Soviet director Yuliya Solntseva in 1961. And Scottish director Lynne Ramsay won the best screenwriting prize for You Were Never Really Here, in a tie with The Killing of a Sacred Deer, written by director Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou.
You Were Never Really Here also took the best actor prize, for Joaquin Phoenix’s turn as a troubled hitman. Diane Kruger was named best actress for her role as a terror victim in the German film In the Fade.
And the jury gave a special 70thanniversary prize to Nicole Kidman, who appeared in four projects at Cannes this year, including The Beguiled and The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
When I asked the female jurors about the representation of women in front of and behind the camera, Jessica Chastain said she found the portrayal of women in many of the competition films “quite disturbing.”
“If you have female storytelling, you have more authentic female characters,” she said, adding she wanted to see more strong, proactive women on the screen; “more of the women I recognize in my day-to-day life.”
Her fellow juror, German director Maren Ade, whose film Toni Erdmann went home empty-handed from Cannes last year in spite of being a critical favourite, echoed the need for more female filmmakers to be seen and celebrated. Otherwise, she said, “we’re missing a lot of stories they might tell, not just about female characters but their views on men.”
The Grand Prix (the unofficial second prize at Cannes) was won by 120 Beats Per Minute by Moroccan director Robin Campillo, about activists in Paris in the 1990s fighting for the world to take notice of the AIDS epidemic.
Almodóvar, who is gay, choked back tears when he spoke of film’s portrayal of “the heroes who saved many lives.”
The Jury Prize was given to Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev for Loveless, in which a couple in the midst of a divorce find their lives thrown into even greater turmoil by the sudden disappearance of their 12-year-old son.