`Triangle of Sadness' garners Palme d'Or
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 Saturday in a closing ceremony inside Cannes' Grand Lumière 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.
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.