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The closing night of the Cannes Film Festival is notorious for making jaws drop. Regulars are well used to arguing bitterly over the awards, and cursing wayward juries for celebrating all the wrong films and neglecting the right ones. This year, however, judiciousness and a real openness to cinema’s richest possibilities prevailed — as you would expect from a competition jury headed by Juliette Binoche.
The fabled Palme d’Or went to It Was Just an Accident, the latest from Iranian director Jafar Panahi, about a man who kidnaps someone he suspects was the government interrogator who once tortured him. Taking in absurdist comedy, allusions to Waiting for Godot and trenchant psychological drama, this was a typically bold work from one of cinema’s most irrepressible dissident voices. Over the years subject to interrogation, imprisonment and a ban on filmmaking activities (now lifted), Panahi has continued to defy the Iranian regime by working under the most challenging circumstances, often taking those very circumstances as inspiration. His Palme d’Or acknowledges his achievements and struggles, but it also awards a bracingly tough and entertaining piece of political cinema.
The Cannes competition traditionally puts newcomers in the spotlight, and one such revelation was this year’s winner of the Best Performance by an Actress award — Nadia Melliti, a French sports science student of Tunisian descent, making her debut in Hafsia Herzi’s tender, empathetic The Little Sister. She plays a young woman from an Algerian family in Paris who has to weigh her devout Muslim upbringing against her emerging lesbian identity. Melliti mixes sensitivity, toughness and an edge of enigmatic reserve; it will be fascinating to see where she goes from here.
The Best Performance by an Actor went to a more established name, Brazil’s Wagner Moura, known for Netflix’s Narcos and 2008 Berlin Golden Bear winner Elite Squad. He is typically charismatic as a man on the run in Brazil’s dictatorship years in The Secret Agent by Kleber Mendonça Filho, who won this year’s Best Director prize. This is a kinetically paced political thriller set amid a densely detailed recreation of 1970s Recife, the city that this brilliant director has celebrated in previous films such as 2012’s Neighbouring Sounds.
Another established name receiving a further boost of prestige is Danish-Norwegian director Joachim Trier, with the Grand Prix winner Sentimental Value, a richly structured, altogether novelistic drama about family tensions, starring Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve. And there was another award for Cannes veterans Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, winners of two Palmes d’Or for Rosetta in 1999 and The Child in 2005: this time, they won Best Screenplay for their ensemble piece Young Mothers.
You also hope that Cannes will reward innovation, and this year it certainly did. The competition’s most exuberantly inventive film was Special Award winner Resurrection by Chinese director Bi Gan, a hallucinatory fantasy about a world in which dreaming no longer exists, a gorgeously perplexing confection that was the outright visual treat of this year’s festival. More downbeat, but no less dreamlike, was Sound of Falling, by up-and-coming German director Mascha Schilinski, a female-centred drama about four generations on a farm in eastern Germany, as borders change and memories shift.
It was a deserving co-winner of the Jury Prize, shared with Sirât, by French-Spanish director Oliver Laxe. This was a road movie about a man searching for his daughter in the Moroccan desert and teaming up with a group of techno-hippie nomads, their journey taking them into nail-bitingly dangerous territory. With its audacious narrative twists and electronica score, Sirât is a trip in every sense, the latest from an audacious director whose taste for risk could make him his generation’s Werner Herzog.
festival-cannes.com
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