Battle of male egos film top award
Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari’s comedy of manhood Chevalier was named best picture at the London Film Festival on Saturday, during a ceremony that honoured Cate Blanchett with a major career award.
It was a fitting finale to a festival that sought to showcase the work of talented women both onscreen and behind the camera.
Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, who headed a prize jury that included actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Kristin Scott Thomas, said Tsangari’s film about a battle of egos among six men on a yacht was ‘‘both a hilarious comedy and a deeply disturbing statement on the condition of Western humanity.’’
The film beat much-praised contenders including Cary Fukunaga’s child-soldier saga Beasts of No Nation and Laszlo Nemes’ searing Holocaust drama Son of Saul.
Blanchett was awarded the British Film Institute Fellowship by her Lord of the Rings co-star Ian McKellen in recognition of a career that has already netted her Oscars for The Aviator and Blue Jasmine.
Blanchett starred in two films at the festival: Todd Haynes’ 1950s-set lesbian romance Carol and James Vanderbilt’s Truth, in which she plays TV news producer Mary Mapes, who was fired over a story about former US President George W Bush’s military service.
American director Robert Eggers’ Pilgrim horror film The Witch won the festival’s first-feature prize.
Jennifer Peedom’s Himalayan study Sherpa was named best documentary and An Old Dog’s Diary by Shai Heredia and Shumona Goel took the short-film trophy.
The 59th annual London festival aimed to put strong women centre stage, opening with Sarah Gavron’s political drama Suffragette and featuring 46 female-directed films among its 240 features.
The 12-day event brought a slew of awards-worthy female performances, including Blanchett and Rooney Mara as clandestine lovers in Carol, Brie Larson as a mother in an extreme situation in Room, and Maggie Smith as a redoubtable eccentric in The Lady in the Van.
Founded in 1957 to show the best of the year’s world cinema to a British audience, the London Film Festival has boosted its profile in recent years with bigger movies, more glittering stars and prizes to boost emerging awards-season contenders. Its prizewinners have a strong track record at the Oscars. The last two London winners, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan and Pawlikowski’s Ida, faced off in this year’s foreign-language Academy Award race. Ida won.