Favourites flop at Cannes
After rave reviews and talk of a seventh Oscar nomination for her performance in Todd Haynes’ Carol, a 1950s-era lesbian romance based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, Cate Blanchett was regarded as a shoo-in for the best actress award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
However, the two-time Academy Award-winner was trumped by her co-star Rooney Mara, the 30-year-old American actress best known for her brief but devastating turn as Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend in The Social Network and as the single-minded hacker in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
Haynes accepted on behalf of Mara, who had already returned to New York from the festival. “I'm a very lucky director ... to have been able to work with actresses of the level of Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara,” Haynes said at Sunday night’s glittering ceremony.
Mara shared the acting prize with Emmanuelle Bercot for her work in the largely improvised French romantic drama Mon Roi (My King) in which her character looks back on a destructive relationship with a deceitful but charming boyfriend (Vincent Cassell).
The award capped a great fortnight in Cannes for Bercot, who also directed the opening film Standing Tall, becoming only the second woman ever to open the world’s premiere movie festival.
The unexpected winner of the major prize, the Palme d’Or, was Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan, an intimate, mostly Tamil-language drama about a family of Sri Lankan refugees in Paris. Dheepan received largely tepid reviews so it was not surprising that the win by Audiard was greeted with a mixture of boos and applause from the reliably voluble Cannes crowd.
“Thank you, Michael Haneke, for not making a film this year,” Audiard said as he accepted his prize, a reference to the fact that the Austrian director of The White Ribbon and Amour had beaten him for the Palme in his last two times in competition, with A Prophet (2009) and Rust and Bone (2012).
Jury co-presidents Joel and Ethan Coen defended giving the top award to Dheepan at a press conference following the ceremony. “We all thought it was a beautiful movie,” Ethan Coen said. To which Joel Coen added “This isn’t a jury of film critics. This is a jury of artists looking at the work.”
The win by Audiard was the icing on the cake for the French, with the great Vincent Lindon winning the acting prize for Stephane Brize’s well-received social drama The Measure of a Man, in which he plays a laid-off factory worker struggling to make ends meet.
The Grand Prix (effectively the silver medal) went to Son of Saul, a “powerfully immersive” Holocaust drama from first-time Hungarian filmmaker Laszlo Nemes that had played early on in the festival.
“When we emerged from Son of Saul, we had a very long moment of reflection and silence,” jury member Xavier Dolan said. “It’s one of those films that slowly grows into you.”
“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything that was that effective on that subject,” added another juror, actress Sienna Miller. “I thought it was an extraordinary achievement as a first film.”
Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien received the award for best director for The Assassin, a visually sumptuous martial-arts epic set in ninth-century China. The film marked the seventh time in competition for Hou, who previously won the jury prize for 1993’s The Puppetmaster.
Juror Guillermo Del Toro, the Oscar- winning Mexican master fantasist (Pan’s Labyrinth), praised Hou’s filmmaking for speaking “in a language, a clarity and a poetry that was exceedingly strong”.
Many of the 3000 journalists who descended on the ritzy Mediterranean resort town expected the winner to be Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster, a surreal sci-fi love story where marriage and procreation are mandatory and singles are given 45 days to pair up or face grim consequences.
The Lobster, which is Lanthimos’ first English-language feature and stars Colin Farrell and Rachiel Weisz, won the Jury Prize (the competition’s bronze medal) and, if reviews are anything to go by, is bound to win a wide audience after the festival season.
