French director Audiard has Palme in hand with first-place win
What’s it like to be part of the jury at Cannes?
“I was making love to cinema all day,” said Spanish actress Rossy de Palma, part of the nine-member jury that gave the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, to Dheepan, a film about Sri Lankan immigrants in France, directed by Jacques Audiard.
Quebec’s Xavier Dolan was less succinct but just as moved. “I have never experienced something like that,” said the 26-year-old actor and director. “It will change me as a human being, reflecting on what movies are, what a director wants to tell you. I somehow feel like a better person.”
“You’re not,” chided jury co- president Joel Coen, though he allowed that presiding over the jury with his brother, Ethan, “profoundly changes your perspective as an audience member.”
The jury of the 68th edition of the Cannes Film Festival had nothing for the lone Canadian director, Denis Villeneuve, or his film Sicario. Though as Ethan noted, “you can’t give the prize to every movie or indeed any prize to some movies.”
There had been much speculation that Carole, Todd Haynes’ film about a lesbian love story, based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, would take the Palme. It won half a prize when the jury named Rooney Mara from that film and Emmanuelle Bercot, who stars in Mon Roi, as co-recipients of the best actress prize.
The Coens explained that there are rules about multiple prizes, and rules that permit only one joint prize. Ironically, some of these came about after the Coens’ Barton Fink won the Palme d’Or, best director(s) and best actor for John Turturro in 1991.
This year’s Grand Prix winner — or second place, title notwithstanding — was Son of Saul, a first film from Hungarian director László Nemes. The Holocaust drama features a concentration camp prisoner who finds a body he takes to be that of his son. The film follows the man as he tries to arrange for a proper Jewish burial.
The Jury Prize, or third place, went to Yorgos Lanthimos and his new film The Lobster, a bizarre tale about a future society in which people are forced to find love or be turned into animals.
Hou Hsiao-Hsien won the best director prize for The Assassin, a remarkably quiet martial arts movie that galvanized critics in spite of its slow pace and obscure plot. (One reporter tried to suggest that perhaps the jury hadn’t understood the film, a notion quickly rebuffed by the Coens.)
The best screenplay prize was given to Mexican director Michel Franco for Chronic, a film that stars Tim Roth as a nurse who cares for terminally ill patients.