Cannes Palme d’Or goes to Ruben Ostlund’s ‘The Square’
The Cannes Film Festival awarded its coveted Palme d’Or award to Ruben Ostlund’s Swedish comedy “The Square” on Sunday, while Sofia Coppola became only the second woman to win the best director award.
“Oh my god! OK,” the Swedish filmmaker exclaimed after he bounded onto the stage to collect the prestigious Palme, in a rare and somewhat surprising win for a comedy.
In “The Square,” Claes Bang plays a museum director whose manicured life begins to unravel after a series of events that upset his, and the museum’s, calm equilibrium.
The president of the Cannes jury, Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, praised the film for exploring the “dictatorship” of political correctness and those trapped by it.
“They live in a kind of hell because of that,” Almodovar said.
“It’s clever. It’s witty. It’s funny. It deals with questions so important,” said French actress and filmmaker Agnes Jaoui, a member of the jury that also included Americans Will Smith and Jessica Chastain.
Most odds makers didn’t have “The Square” as a favorite to win the prestigious Palme d’Or, the top prize awarded at Cannes.
Coppola won best director for “The Beguiled,” her remake of Don Siegel’s 1971 Civil War drama about a Union soldier hiding out in a Southern girls’ school. Hailed as Coppola’s most feminist work yet, the remade thriller told from a more female point of view stars Nicole Kidman and Kirsten Dunst, with Colin Farrell playing the wounded soldier.
Coppola was one of three female filmmakers out of 19 in competition for the Palme this year.
Diane Kruger was named best actress and Joaquin Phoenix best actor as the festival celebrated its 70th anniversary.
Kruger was honored for her performance in Fatih Akin’s “In the Fade.” She played a German woman whose son and Turkish husband are killed in a bomb attack.
Phoenix was recognized for his role in Lynne Ramsay’s thriller “You Were Never Really Here,” in which he played a war veteran trying to save a teenage girl from a sex trafficking ring.
The French AIDS drama “120 Beats Per Minute” won the Grand Prize from the jury. The award recognizes a strong film that missed out on the Palme d’Or.
There were no prizes for the first Netflix releases selected to be in competition for the Palme d’Or: Bong Joon-ho’s “Okja” and Noah Baumbach’s “The Meyerowitz Stories.”
Almodovar had made clear that he didn’t want the Palme to go to a movie that isn’t shown on big screens.