Cate Blanchett kept her word at Cannes
Cate Blanchett did exactly what she said she was going to do at the recent Cannes Film Festival, something that seems almost astounding in retrospect, given the tenor of the event and the times.
The Aussie actress, this year’s president of the Palme d’Or jury, vowed on opening day of the fest May 8 that she and her fellow eight jurors would be “dealing with what’s in front of us” when viewing the 21 films competing for the Palme and other prizes.
Her panel, she insisted, wouldn’t be handing out gold on the basis of gender or #MeToo or #TimesUp or any other virtuous concerns outside the screening rooms.
“There are several women in competition this year but they’re not there because of their gender, they’re there because of the quality of their work,” she said. “We will assess them as filmmakers, as we should be.”
These were noble words, but Blanchett was expressing them at the annual meet-the-jury event at Cannes, which is to film festivals what a political debate is to an election. Few people expect the rhetoric to meet the reality, once the spotlight is turned off.
The usual routine for a Cannes jury press conference is for each of the nine members to solemnly declare their opposition to judging works of art — just before they begin their two-week task of judging works of art.
Many critics at Cannes, present company included, assumed that Blanchett’s resolve would be tempered by the temptation to make history by choosing one of the three female-directed films in this year’s competition as the Palme winner. And few of us, I reckon, would have objected to a bit of affirmative action to right the long-standing wrong of men dominating the winner’s circle at Cannes.
It’s been a quarter of a century since Jane Campion’s Palme win for The Piano in 1993, the only time in the 71-year history of Cannes that a woman has won the top prize. And Campion had to share the Palme with a man, Chen Kaige, whose Farewell, My Concubine was also judged that year’s Palme winner, in a tie vote.
A solo Palme win for a woman in 2018 would have been all the sweeter, and Blanchett and the other four women on the jury — director Ava DuVernay, actresses Kristen Stewart and Léa Seydoux and singer-songwriter Khadja Nin — signalled they were eager to see women advance. All five joined a midfest protest march of 82 women up the red stairs of the Palais des Festivals, their number signifying the number of female directors who have competed for prizes at Cannes over the past seven decades, as opposed to 1,866 male directors who have done so.
What’s more, two of the three female-directed films in this year’s Cannes competition were getting raves from critics: Nadine Labaki’s Lebanese neo-realist drama Capernaum broke hearts and inspired Palme predictions with its story of children struggling to survive street abandonment; and Alice Rohrwacher’s Italian time-travel fantasy Happy as Lazzaro seemed another natural, an art-house enchantment that doubled as social commentary.
(The third film, French filmmaker Eva Husson’s war movie Girls of the Sun, about an allfemale battalion seeking to liberate a Kurdish town from Daesh militants, was generally shunned by critics, although I expect it will do better with mainstream audiences.)
Lo and behold, when Blanchett and her panel emerged from the seclusion of scrutinizing last Saturday, they had awarded the Palme to a man: Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda for Shoplifters, the story of a multigenerational family of grifters that slowly reveals its secrets.
Blanchett said she and her fellow jury members — which also included directors Denis Villeneuve, Andrei Zvyagintsev and Robert Guédiguian, plus actor Chang Chen — were “completely bowled over” by the gentle humanism of Shoplifters.
The second-place Grand Prix also went to a man: Spike Lee for BlacKkKlansman, a factbased drama of a Black police detective infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, which has the reality-checking documentary coda of a woman’s death at a white-supremacist rally last summer in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The third-place Jury Prize went to Labaki’s Capernaum, while Rohrwacher had to make do with the screenwriting prize for Happy as Lazzaro, which she shared with Iran’s statedetained Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces, the story of a quest for a missing girl.
The jury even concocted something they called the Palme d’Or Spéciale to give to French filmmaking icon Jean-Luc Godard for his eyepopping rant The Image Book, in recognition of his “continually striving to define and redefine what cinema can be.”
Blanchett repeated her vow that the films would be judged on their artistic merit alone: “As artists working in cinema, we made a pact with one another that we would look at each film as a work of art in and of itself.”
Incredibly, Blanchett’s jury overlooked Burning, the intense psychodrama by South Korea’s Lee Chang-dong that critics overwhelmingly judged the best of the fest, and The Wild Pear Tree by Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan, a father/son reckoning which had also bowled over the critics.
But nobody expects perfection from a Palme jury, or any jury for that matter.
And prior to Cannes 2018, which turned out to be a superb festival, nobody expected a Palme jury to keep its word, either. Art triumphed over politics, which is a victory unto itself in these fractured times.