Square takes Cannes by surprise
CANNES, France — At a Cannes Film Festival where the purposes and parameters of art have been much debated, with Netflix, virtual reality and television series making rare and sometimes first-time appearances, it was only fitting that the Palme d’Or was awarded Sunday night to The Square, Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s blisteringly funny and provocative portrait of a modern-art museum curator enduring a crisis of conscience.
Thanking one of his collaborators in his acceptance speech, Ostlund said, “We made a film that is 2 1/2 hours, and I think you’re the only producer who said, after the screening last Sunday, ‘We have to make the film longer!’ ”
The Square, which was announced in late April as a lastminute addition to the competition, drew a broad but largely favourable range of reactions when it premièred over the festival’s first weekend. Starring Claes Bang and Elisabeth Moss, it will be released in the U.S. by Magnolia Pictures.
A similarly long and sprawling entry, Robin Campillo’s 120 Beats per Minute, won the Grand Prix, the runner-up to the Palme. A moving tribute to the Paris wing of the AIDS activist group ACT UP in the ’90s, inspired by Campillo’s own experience, the film was one of the competition’s most well-received titles.
Eleven years after drawing a few boos and zero prizes for her competition entry Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola won directing honors for The Beguiled, her slyly feminist adaptation of a Civil War-era novel that previously inspired Don Siegel’s 1971 thriller starring Clint Eastwood. The new film, a Focus Features release, has a mostly female cast led by Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning.
Elsewhere, the jury, led by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, spread the wealth around, though its members did bestow two awards on one film in particular. Joaquin Phoenix received the actor prize for his performance as a schlubby, severely troubled hit man in Scottish writer-director Lynne Ramsay’s stylish and violent crime thriller You Were Never Really Here.
You Were Never Really Here, an adaptation of a Jonathan Ames novella, shared the screenplay award with The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a nightmarish, darkly funny portrait of an American family in paralytic meltdown written by the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos and his co-writer Efthimis Filippou. Lanthimos previously scored the Cannes jury prize in 2015 for his surreal satire The Lobster.
Diane Kruger received the actress prize for her performance as a woman seeking justice, then revenge, for the deaths of her loved ones in a terrorist attack in In the Fade, a drama from the German Turkish director Fatih Akin.