Too kind movie

On May 22, the Cannes Film Festival ended with an unexpected scandal, albeit behind the scenes: the jury awarded films that no critic or viewer considered the best

Usually, when they talk about politics at festivals, nothing negative is put into these words. Taking into account the current agenda is the duty of any sane review. But never before has it happened so declaratively as at Cannes 2016. The jury, led by Australian commercial film genius George Miller (The Witches of Eastwick, Mad Max), ignored all the audience's favorites without exception and made a discouraging choice.

German Maren Ade's paradoxical comedy "Tony Erdman", which was greeted with a standing ovation at the premiere, Jim Jarmusch's poetic film manifesto "Paterson", the provocative anti-bourgeois comedy about rape "She" by Paul Verhoeven, as well as films by the Dardenne brothers, Pedro Almodovar, Christy Puyu, Alena Ghirodi, Bruno Dumont, Pak Chang Wook - the leading directors of modern cinema - were left without any awards at all. Among those left behind are the young and the distinguished, geniuses and beginners, radicals and traditionalists. As if they had deliberately decided not to reward the best.

Who was awarded instead of them? Ken Loach, the 79-year-old classic of British social realism, who already has one ten-year-old Palme d'Or to his credit, received a second for the heartbreaking proletarian drama I Daniel Blake about a carpenter who survived a heart attack - he is ruined by a heartless state, forcing him to walk on authorities and fill out online forms in search of financial support. Loach, a man of talent and passion, shouted something from the stage about the horrors of neoliberalism and received a predictable ovation. The film, on the other hand, did not say anything new to world cinema.

The youngest contestant, Canadian Xavier Dolan, filmed the sentimental melodrama Just the End of the World about an AIDS-stricken writer who came home to say goodbye to his family. At the most touching places, the audience laughed, and when Dolan went on stage for the undeserved Grand Prix and began to shed tears of emotion (literally like his heroes), the laughter turned into laughter. In the rating of critics, Dolan's picture was in the penultimate place.

  **Похоже, на Западе есть свой стандарт «доброго» или «полезного» кино — пусть и не глянцевито-комедийного, как в путинской России, а общественно-полезного: о странах третьего мира, о бедняках и угнетенных, о борьбе за справедливость**

There were enough acting achievements in the competition, but the Filipino Jacqueline Jose and the Iranian Shahab Hosseini were awarded. The films in which they starred, Brilliante Mendoza's Mama Rosa and Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman, were dedicated to the fate of "little people", a drug dealer pressed by corrupt police and a literature teacher who plays in an amateur theater. Probably, the jury was shedding tears, as they were over the fate of the "white trash", the poor teenagers from Andrea Arnold's blurry and boring road-movie "American Cutie" (Jury Prize). In general, whatever the award, then by, with rare exceptions: the drama of the Romanian Cristian Mungiu "Graduation" (prize for directing) is really good.

It seems that the West has its own standard of "kind" or "useful" cinema - if not glossy comedy, as in Putin's Russia, but socially useful: about third world countries, about the poor and the oppressed, about the struggle for justice. The clearer and simpler these ideas are presented, the better. But not a single film with a frank sex scene (there were half of them in the competition), at least with some kind of humor or poetry, was awarded. The festival was excellent. And the prizes are probably good in their own way, they just have almost nothing to do with the art of cinema.