A Palme with an asterisk
Campion only woman to win top prize — sort of
Popular lore has it that, in the first 72 years of the Cannes Film Festival, only one woman has ever won the top prize: Jane Campion for The Piano back in 1993.
That’s technically true, but the fact comes with an asterisk. In 2013, Tunisian-french director Abdellatif Kechiche won the prize for Blue Is the Warmest Colour, a three-hour, R-rated exploration of lesbian love. But Steven Spielberg, presiding over the Cannes jury that year, chose to award three Palmes d’or — one to Kechiche, and one to each of the film’s main actresses, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. So while Campion remains the only female director to have won, she is one of three female winners overall.
Seydoux and Exarchopoulos both appeared in new French films at Cannes this year. Exarchopoulos played a troubled actress in Sibyl, directed by Justine Triet, while Seydoux starred in Oh Mercy! (Roubaix, une lumière) from Arnaud Desplechin.
Kechiche was reportedly unhappy with the triple-palme decision, telling the Hollywood Reporter in 2017: “Who decreed this new rule and on the strength of what? Can one go around giving Palmes on a whim just because one presides over a festival? In that case, why did the Dardenne brothers get only one Palme?”
Belgian filmmakers Jean-pierre and Luc Dardenne actually do have two Palmes, just not for the same movie. The brothers, who co-direct all their films, won for Rosetta in 1999 and The Child in 2005. They won a directing prize this year with Young Ahmed, about a Belgian Muslim teenager who embraces religious extremism.
Kechiche, meanwhile, sold his Palme d’or to finance post-production on his next film, Mektoub, My Love. The producers pulled funding when they learned that, instead of making one two-hour movie, he planned at least two of three hours each. Canto Uno, the first part, premièred at the Venice Film Festival in 2017. Intermezzo, which actually runs to four hours, debuted at Cannes and placed last in a critics’ poll run by trade publication Screen Daily.