Triangle of Sadness wins Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Fest
CANNES, FRANCE: Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s class warfare comedy Triangle of Sadness won the Palme d’Or at the 75th Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, giving Ostlund one of cinema’s most prestigious prizes for the second time.
Ostlund, whose art-world send-up The Square took the Palme in 2017, pulled off the rare feat of winning Cannes’ top award for back-to-back films. Triangle of Sadness, featuring Woody Harrelson as a Marxist yacht captain and a climactic scene with rampant vomiting, pushes the satire even further.
“We wanted after the screening ( for people) to go out together and have something to talk about,” said Ostlund. “All of us agree that the unique thing with cinema is that we’re watching together. So we have to save something to talk about but we should also have fun and be entertained.”
The awards were selected by a nine-member jury headed by French actor Vincent Lindon and presented on Saturday in a closing ceremony inside Cannes’ Grand Lumiere Theater.
The jury’s second prize, the Grand Prix, was shared between the Belgian director Lukas Dhont’s tender boyhood drama Close, about two 13-year-old boys whose bond is tragically separated after their intimacy is mocked by schoolmates; and French filmmaking legend Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon, a Denis Johnson adaptation starring Margaret Qualley as a journalist in Nicaragua.
The directing prize went to South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden) for his twisty noir Decision to Leave, a romance fused with a police procedural.
Korean star Song Kang-ho was named best actor for his performance in Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film Broker, about a Korean family seeking a home for an abandoned baby.
“I’d like to thank all those who appreciate Korean cinema,” said Song, who also starred in Bong Joon-ho’s Palme d’Or winning film Parasite in Cannes three years ago.
Best actress went to Zar Amir Ebrahimi for her performance as a journalist in Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider, a true- crime thriller about a serial killer targeting sex workers in the Iranian religious city of Mashhad.
The jury prize was split between the friendship tale The Eight Mountains, by Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix Van Groeningen, and Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, about a donkey’s journey across a pitiless modern Europe.
The jury also awarded a special award for the 75th Cannes to Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, two-time Palme-winners, for their immigrant drama Tori and Lokita. Swedish-Egyptian filmmaker Tarik Saleh took best screenplay at Cannes for Boy From Heaven, a thriller set in Cairo’s Al-Azhar Mosque.
The award for best first film, the Camera d’Or, went to Riley Keough and Gina Gammell for War Pony, a drama about the Pine Ridge Reservation made in collaboration with Oglala Lakota and Sicangu Lakota citizens.