I’ve emphasized two or three times that last night’s awarding of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or to Cristian Mingiu‘s Fjord was fully deserved.
I regretfully felt that Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Minotaur, an anti-Putin, anti-Ukraine War makeover of Claude Chabrol‘s La Femme Infidel (’69), was a bit rote or even humdrum (it lacks the silky, sensual intrigue of Adrien Lyne‘s Unfaithful, the first Chabrol remake).
But I was nonetheless glad for the jury handing Andrey the Grand Prix award, or basically the second-place prize. It was driven, I believe, by two sentiments: (a) “Good for you, Andrej, for slamming Putin’s demonic war” and (b) “We’re very heartened, Andrej, that you’ve recovered from your horrible Covid illness and that you’re back on the stick.”
I’m kind of appalled that the Best Screenplay trophy went to Emmanuel Marre for A Man Of His Time, an indisputably flat saga about Henri Marre (the director-writer’s great-grandfather) playing the bureaucratic go-along game under Marshall Petain‘s Vichy regime in early 1940s France.
Splitting the Best Actress award between All Of A Sudden costars Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto was one of those “our hearts and spirits are melting and so we’re locking arms in solidarity” thing. A trio of female jury members — Demi Moore, Chloe Zhao and Ruth Negga — were so exceptionally moved by the confessional, open-hearted dialogue between Efira and Okamoto that they ignored the fact that their performances have zero dramatic energy or any kind of constructive strategy — their characters do nothing except give voice to meditative Zen musings about facing death with grace and courage as well as the importance of caring and nurturing.
Splitting the Best Actor trophy between Coward costars Emmanuel Macchia, whose wet-behind—the-ears performance is thuddingly one-note (he mostly does a zombie stare while occasionally slightly grinning), and the excessively cloying and wildly irritating Valentin Campagne, whom I wanted to strangle minutes after his initial appearance, was flat-out ridiculous. In so doing the jury spat in the faces of the far more deserving Javier Bardem (The Beloved) and Rami Malek (The Man I Love).