And the Palme d’Or goes to . . . who knows?
CANNES, FRANCE— Can Will Smith trounce Pedro Almodovar in the Palme d’Or cage match? Will a female tag team of Jessica Chastain, Maren Ade, Agnès Jaoui and Fan Bingbing triumph?
Or will it be something altogether unexpected, as per usual?
We critics covering the Cannes Film Festival like to kid ourselves that we know what’s going on in the minds of the nine sequestered jurors — five men, four women — who must decide which of the 19 competition films will get the Palme, the runner-up Grand Prix or other prizes at Sunday’s closing ceremony.
We’ve all been avidly following the daily straw polls of other critics over the 12-day run of this 70th-anniversary edition of the legendary film fest, chiefly the global panel published in Screen International and the French one in Le film français.
The Screen poll currently suggests a Russian film will take the Palme: Andrey Zvyagintsev’s masterfully bleak lost-boy procedural Loveless, set against a backdrop of family and societal disintegration. The critics of Le film français are highly enthused about a film very close to home, Robin Campillo’s 120 Beats Per Minute, BPM for short, a well-received drama by the Moroccan-born French filmmaker about Parisian AIDS activism in the 1990s, based on Campillo’s own experiences. Both would be worthy prize recipients; Loveless happens to be my pick for the Palme.
Yet these polls are notoriously inaccurate. Last year, the critics gave recordhigh scores for German filmmaker Maren Ade’s off-beat father-daughter story Toni Erdmann, which left Cannes empty-handed.
And many critics savagely panned It’s Only the End of the World, the highstrung family drama by Quebec’s Xavier Dolan, which ended up winning the Grand Prix. The 2016 Palme went to I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach’s ode to underclass stoicism, a win that few had foreseen.
Still, we persist in our predictions, if only to try to make sense of a 2017 Cannes slate that has seen many divided opinions, including the reaction Friday to Fatih Akin’s In the Fade, a German thriller starring Diane Kruger as a woman out to avenge the terrorist bombing that killed her husband and young son. I viewed it as a thoughtful take on the payback thriller, asking questions about grief and justice that resonate with these perilous times, all the more so in light of the terror atrocity in Manchester this past week. Some critics agreed with me, but many others saw In the Fade as just another genre movie.
Additional clues about this year’s Palme chase have been sussed from the meet-the-jury press conference on opening day back on May 17.
Normally a sedate affair where high-minded things about art and cinema are stated, this one turned into a newsworthy tussle after Spanish filmmaker Almodovar and Hollywood actor Smith squared off over what became the defining controversy of Cannes 2017: whether or not the presence of small-screen avatar Netflix in the Palme competition threatens the dominance of traditional big-screen movies.
Almodovar, who is also the jury president, said he couldn’t imagine giving the Palme or any other prize to films made for the small screens of TV, computers and smartphone, which lack the “capacity of hypnosis” that big-screen viewing affords. This doesn’t bode well for the two Netflix films in the competition: Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi fantasy Okja and Noah Baumbach’s dysfunctional family tangle The Meyerowitz Stories.
Smith rose to Netflix’s defence, as other actors have throughout the festival. He argued that he and his family use Netflix at home but also go out to the movies often, and “there’s very little cross” between the two. Smith might be a little biased, since he has the Netflix film Bright coming out in December, a fantasy cop thriller co-starring Noomi Rapace.
Will either man sway the rest of the jury or will they simply cancel each other out with their votes? It’s amusing to think that Almodovar is seen as the defender of traditional cinema, when he has so long been an iconoclast with such censor-baiting films as Bad Education, Talk to Her and The Skin I Live In.
And who’d have figured blockbuster star Smith as a champion of digital tech that takes moviegoers away from the multiplexes he’s been profitably filling for decades? Smith amused everybody here by expressing shock at the Cannes routine of viewing three or more films per day, starting at 8:30 a.m.
But let’s not assume that the “macho coalition” will prevail, to use the words of former Palme juror Isabelle Adjani, who earlier this month spilled the beans on what went down at the 50th Cannes fest in 1997, the first one I attended.
The French actress was jury president that year, but she told Journal du Dimanche that her plan to give the Palme to Canada’s Atom Egoyan for The Sweet Hereafter were undone by “Machiavellian” manoeuvres by fellow juror Nanni Moretti, an Italian filmmaker who would later go on to win the Palme for The Son’s Room in 2001and to lead the jury in 2012. Huppert said Moretti conspired with other men on the jury to give two golden Palmes in 1997: to Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry and Shohei Imamura’s The Eel. Toronto’s Egoyan, meanwhile, had to settle for the Grand Prix.
What’s to stop the women of this year’s jury — filmmaker Ade along with Hollywood actress Jessica Chastain, Chinese actress Fan Bingbing and French actress/singer/filmmaker Agnès Jaoui — from forming a female coalition to advance their own cause?
There are three films directed by women in the competition: Naomi Kawase’s Radiance, Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled and Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, the last of which is the sole Palme film yet to be screened, as I write this Friday afternoon. Just one film directed by a woman has won the Palme in the festival’s 70 years: Jane Campion’s The Piano in 1993.
Who’s to say, though, whether the four women are thinking alike? And what do we make of the remaining three jurors, all men with presumably strong opinions of their own: South Korean writer/director Park Chan-wook, Italian writer/director Paolo Sorrentino and French-Lebanese composer Gabriel Yared?
It’s entirely possible that far from conspiring in coalitions, many of the jurors might now be barely speaking to each other, after being cooped up together for 12 days of challenging movie-watching. As other people have said of moviemaking, baseball and politics, nobody really knows anything.
So let’s just take the easy way out and state the films and actors I’d like to see walk away with some kind of golden trophy come Sunday.
Loveless has been my choice for the Palme since the start of the festival, with Zvyagintsev continuing the artful excoriation of Vladimir Putin’s soulless Russia he began with Leviathan in 2014.
I was also deeply impressed by another Russian film: A Gentle Creature, by Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa, starring Vasilina Makovtseva as a woman who travels to a remote Russian town to find out what happened to her imprisoned husband.
I’d also happily hand the Palme or Grand Prix or other prize to Ruben Ostlund’s art-world satire The Square, Michael Haneke’s bourgeoisie takedown Happy End, or Yorgos Lanthimos’s eye-for-an-eye horror The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
As for the acting prizes, I was impressed by the aforementioned Kruger from In the Fade and Makovtseva from A Gentle Creature, both of them studies of grace under unimaginable pressure.
On the male side of the ledger, I liked rising Irish star Barry Keoghan from The Killing of a Sacred Deer for his devastatingly deadpan approach to making a devil’s deal. Also worthy of consideration are two career-peak performances from wellknown stars: Adam Sandler as a social “loser” but great father in The Meyerowitz Stories and Robert Pattinson as a resourceful grifter in Good Time, a shaggy dog heist picture by Benny and Josh Safdie that John Steinbeck would have loved, and also fans of movie adrenalin.
As usual, I await for the jury to prove how wrong and delusional I am. But I’m in grand critical company here.
Screen poll suggests Russian film will take the Palme: Andrey Zvyagintsev’s masterfully bleak lost-boy procedural Loveless