Ken Loach took his second Palme d’Or, the highest honour bestowed at Cannes, for “I, Daniel Blake” – an indictment of bureaucratic oppression in Britain. One film critic chose to put together a video running through what they thought were the best films from Cannes, regardless of whether or not they won any prizes.
Advertisement
Most pundits predicted Dolan would go home empty-handed, with the Palme going to Germany’s Maren Ade for her father-daughter comedy Toni Erdmann. Nothing to Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s masterpiece about the quiet life of an unknown poet, a film for which nobody seemed to have anything but effusive praise.
Korean director Park Chan-wook was again vying for the Palme d’Or, this time with his film “The Handmaiden“.
The Best Director prize was, surprisingly, split between Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, for Graduation, about corruption in a post-communist society, and Olivier Assayas, for his supernatural thriller Personal Shopper, starring Kristen Stewart. Most astonishing was the lack of anything at all for Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, a hit with nearly everyone bar the jury.
Presenting his film earlier this month at the global film festival, Loach voiced hesitant support for the United Kingdom to remain in the EU, saying: “The EU, as it stands, is a neo-liberal project”.
Jury president George Miller described the jury’s selection as “rigorous and happy”.
The 79-year-old has had 12 films in competition at Cannes throughout his long career.
My Name is Joe won Peter Mullan best actor at Cannes in 1998. Shocker: Critics, filmmakers, and audiences don’t always agree on what’s the best movie out there.
He also said the jury felt no pressure to give the Palme to a female director, something that has happened just once in Cannes history: Jane Campion’s The Piano in 1993.
But Cannes isn’t just about “films in contention” – those eligible for prizes. “We are in the grip of a unsafe project of austerity driven by ideas that we call neo-liberalism that have brought us to near-catastrophe”. She completed her look with black heels and even more Chanel, in diamond form.
Advertisement
Although McAdams was not able to attend the festival, Daniel traveled to France to represent the film, which also will screen during the Terminus Festival, to be held in next month in Atlanta. But I was genuinely impressed with this relentlessly twisted, violent, amusing Edward Bunker adaptation about a trio of hapless ex-cons whose attempt at a kidnapping job goes horribly awry very quickly. Willem Dafoe presented the award. And Nicolas Cage, playing the lead hood, finally gets a chance to mix his still-considerable charisma with menace, delivering a performance where his energetic, occasionally goofy choices for once actually make sense; he plays one scene with a fake Humphrey Bogart accent, and the sequence starts off deeply unnerving but winds up truly touching. The movie’s quest for a style to call its own is moving; it’s the best thing Schrader’s done in decades. The effect is a film overwhelmed by the possibilities of cinema, in the same way its ex-con characters are overwhelmed by the new world surrounding them.
