Cannes handed out awards

festival/cinema

As expected, the Cannes Palme d'Or was awarded to Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. As was secretly expected, but not fully believed, Kirsten Dunst from Lars von Trier's Melancholia was awarded for Best Actress. On the results and closing of the 64th Cannes Film Festival - ANDREY PLAKHOV.

After the high tension, harsh atmosphere and scandals of the last 12 days, the closing of Cannes 2011 passed easily and cheerfully, as if nothing dramatic had happened. Sexy kitty Maiwenn posed for a long time on the star path, and when she went on stage to receive the lowest-ranking jury prize for the film Polisse, she shamelessly dragged out her speech, getting entangled in tearful thanks - mainly to her former friend and father of her child, Luc Besson, who, looking at her from hall, also shed tears. The chairman of the jury, Robert De Niro, comically distorted French words, calling his companion a “champignon,” and Jean Dujardin, receiving the prize for his male role in the film “The Artist,” tap-danced and thanked his heavily pregnant partner Bérénice Bejo. The only thing missing from the hall was the Jack Crassel terrier Yuggi, to whom “The Artist” owes its happy ending (it was he who saved the hero from the fire); however, the dog was awarded the well-deserved Palm Dog - the canine equivalent of the Palm d`Or.

Catherine Deneuve presented the prize to Jean Dujardin. As soon as the actress appeared in Cannes, she was asked to comment on the scandalous statements of Lars von Trier. The French star said she was shocked by his words, but even more so by the way they were interpreted and used. And Kirsten Dunst, who plays in “Melancholia,” never forgave her director: when receiving the prize for the female role, she thanked the festival for not withdrawing the film from the competition, and did not even mention Trier’s name. It is possible that this was the condition set by the organizers. In any case, the jury showed objectivity (the role of Kirsten Dunst was beyond competition), and the festival gave a hint of a reverse move in the overly exaggerated conflict with Trier.

The prize for the screenplay went to the Israeli Yosef Sedar for the film “Footnote”: this also looked like an indirect consequence of the Trier scandal - a friendly gesture towards Israel. Fortunately, the jury did not award Paolo Sorrentino's dubious film "This Must Be the Place," in which Sean Penn plays an elderly rocker who is on the trail of the Nazi who tortured his father in Auschwitz.

The most prestigious prizes were distributed in the most controversial manner. Dane Nicolas Winding Refn was named best director for the film “Drive,” a brutal film shot in Los Angeles with crunching skulls and bullets driven into the head with a hammer. The piquancy of the situation is that Ryan Gosling plays here a driver drawn into the nightlife of crime, like Robert De Niro in the scandalous “Taxi Driver,” which won at Cannes exactly 35 years ago. Then the head of the jury, Tennessee Williams, accused Martin Scorsese's film of promoting violence - having seen "Drive", he would have turned over in his grave.

The Grand Prix (the second most important prize) was divided between two worthy films - “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” by Nuri Bilge Ceylan and “The Boy on a Bicycle” by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. The prizes were presented by Emir Kusturica, who recalled that this award was once received in Cannes by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky and Aki Kaurismäki. It was a good idea to mention the latter, because with his new film “Le Havre,” which critics and audiences liked the most, he still deserves an award. But Finnish humor (like Danish) turned out to be not understandable to everyone, and Le Havre only received the FIPRESCI prize, while Pedro Almodóvar once again left without any awards at all.

The predominance of Americans on the jury (actors, too) and the obvious lack of an intellectual element in its composition (not a single film critic or film historian) led to predictable mistakes, although it could have been worse. "Boy on a Bicycle", not the best in the Dardennes' track record, was clearly the first work of the Belgians that De Niro saw - in fact, these excellent authors had already been awarded so many times at Cannes that it was possible to miss it once. On the contrary, Terrence Malick, again for the not most successful of his films - "The Tree of Life" - was awarded for his lifetime achievement. The producers received the prize, explaining the director's absence by the fact that he is extremely modest and unsociable. In the large hall the audience applauded politely, but in the press room the applause was mixed with shouts of "boo-boo" that probably belonged, as one Malik apologist wrote in Variety, to "a few clowns on the balcony." In general, the illusion of unanimity was maintained this year in Cannes.

"Tree of Life" is a palm tree