CANNES Festival 2019

[Chris Knipp]

Awards runup predictions

The Palme d’Or ceremony for the 2019 Cannes Film Festival will take place at 8:15pm GMT on May 25.

Peter Bradshaw’s prize predictions

Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw
Palme d’Or: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (dir Céline Sciamma)
Grand Prix: Parasite (dir Bong Joon-ho)
Jury prize: Atlantique (dir Mati Diop)
Best director: Quentin Tarantino for Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood
Best screenplay: Xavier Dolan for Matthias & Maxime
Best actor: Antonio Banderas for Pain and Glory
Best actress: Debbie Honeywood for Sorry We Missed You
'Imaginary' Cannes awards – AKA Braddies d’Or
Best supporting actor: Alexis Manenti for Les Misérables
Best supporting actress: Sônia Braga for Bacurau
Best cinematography: Dong Jingsong for The Wild Goose Lake (dir Diao Yinan)
Best music: Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
Best production design: Andrea Castorina and Jutta Freyer for The Traitor (dir Marco Bellocchio)

A.A. Dowd of AV Club predicts:

A.A. Dowd of AV Club
Palme d'Or: either Portrait of a Lady on Fire or Pain and Glory, more likely the former.
Grand Jury Prize: Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood - but he prefers Parasite
Best Director: Elia Suleiman - but he prefers Diao Yinan of The Wild Goose Lake
Best Actor: Antonio Banderas - but he prefers Leonardo DiCaprio
Best Actress: If Portrait of a Lady on Fire doesn't get the Palme, then Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel - if it does, Debbie Honeywood of Sorry We Missed You[ - but he prefers Emily Beecham of Little Joe
Jury Prize: Mati Diop's Atlantics - but he prefers Bacaru
Screenplay: Parasite - but he prefers The Whistlers

Eric Kohn of IndieWire makes a list


Eric Kohn of IndieWire

Kohn simply lists all the Competition films in order of likelihoiod of winning a rize, with descriptions H E R E
HIS TOP SIX ARE:
1. Pain and Glory
2. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
3. Parasite
4. Les Miserables
5. A Hidden Life
6. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

[Chris Knipp]

Some Screen Daily headlines

- Brazil's 'The Invisible Life Of Eurídice Gusmão' wins Cannes Un Certain Regard
-'Alice And The Mayor', 'An Easy Girl' win Cannes Directors' Fortnight awards
-Abdellatif Kechiche’s 'Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo' lands bottom on Screen’s Cannes jury grid

"Abdellatif Kechiche’s sequel title Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo has failed to impress the critics on Screen’s Cannes jury grid, recording the lowest score so far this year of 1.5."

The Screen Daily Jury Grid referred to (omitting only Suleiman and Triet of the Competition titles) is below:

[Chris Knipp]

Some films from earlier days.



The Orphanage/Parwareshgah (Shahrbanoo Sadat). Directors' Fortnight. (May 18)

Jay Weissberg's Variety review notes this "episodic film" is about "an Afghan teen's time in a Kabul orphanage" (and attempt to survive on the street) just before the Russian withdrawal, and it has some "knowingly clumsy Bollywood recreations" that "add significant flavor." This number two of a planned five-part sequence is "something of a comedown from her 2016 debut," says Weissberg, but like it, mixes "folklore with realism." In her Screen Daily review, Sarah Ward says that by "stepping back" three decades from current woes, the film offers "a rare but worthy viewpoint," and while "filtering the experiences of 15-year-old Qodratollah (Wolf and Sheep’s Qodratollah Qadiri) through his love for Indian cinema" may seem an odd choice, it's one that "proves as smart as it is bold." The "Bollywood-style dream sequences," Ward says, "are likely to resonate with audiences." "Not exactly a tightly wound narrative," says Jordan Mintzer in his Hollywood Reporter review, but "a minor but moving coming-of-age drama set in a difficult time and place."



The Cordillera of Dreams/La Cordillera de los Sueños" (Patricio Guzmán). Special Screenings. (May 17).

This is the completion of a "sublimely meditative, deeply persona trilogy" that tracks "a personal, political and philosophical journey" through "Chile's history and landscape," explains Jessica Kiang in her Variety review. Deborah Young explains in her Hollywood Reporter review that throughout the trilogy Guzmán has sought to relate landscape to collective experience, comparing "the vastness, grandeur and indifference of nature" to "the human horrors that Chileans have lived through." But she feels that this completion to the trilogy, though "deeply felt," but "much less interesting than its predecessors." Guzmán has lived in France since the 1973 coup, and, returning, finds Santiágo, with its new skyscrapers nearly unrecognizable. Guzman’s "sad backwards glance, says young "will strike a universal chord." The earlier trilogies focused on desert and waterways; this one, on the Andes Cordillera mountains which, though impressive, are not as good a symbol of this country's irreparable damage. The film is also a tribute to documentarian Pablo Salas, who remained in Chile and recorded protests over the past 45 years. I reviewed Guzmán's previous film, The Pearl Button, in Paris in 2015.



First Love/初恋 Hatsukoi (Takashi Miike). Directors' Fortnight. (May 17).

"A riotous rom-com with a high body count," says Stephen Dalton in Hollywood Reporter. The "pulp splatter-fest" is mild by Miike standards, with nothing much new, explains Dalton, but " the Tarantino-style rollercoaster ride is as effortlessly enjoyable as ever.' Likewise Kaleem Aftab's Cineropa review confirms that this is one of the ultra-prolific and frequently uneven Japanese pulpmeister's successes. Bradley Warren of The Playlist says this "finds the filmmaker at his most engaged, playful and coherent." Another collaboration, notably, with British producer Jeremy Thomas and his Recorded Picture Company, which has led to such highly watchable Miike films as 13 Assassins, Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai and Blade of the Immortal. This however is a modern-dress film. It focuses on one long night, and concerns a baby-faced gangster who "tries to double cross his bosses," setting up a "secret side deal" with "crooked cops to hijack an incoming drugs shipment," which of course goes awry, says Dalton. A young women wielding s sword is out seeking revenge for her yakuza boyfriend's murder. A "huge showdown" in a warehouse store involves "mobsters, police, one-armed bandits and elite Chinese assassins." It's all staged with "typically zippy, kinetic, brightly colored panache." In his IndieWire review David Erlich calls the result a "hysterically violent absurdist comedy," a "hard-boiled piece of pulp fiction" that he finds "frequently sublime."

[Chris Knipp]

Cannes 2019: The awards.

The full list of winners for the 2019 Cannes Film Festival is below. Links to review summaries from this thread.

Palme d’Or: Parasite, dir. Bong Joon-ho

Grand Prix: Atlantics, dir. Mati Diop

Jury Prize: Les Misérables, dir. Ladj Ly and Bacurau, dir Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, jointly

Best Actress: Emily Beecham, Little Joe

Best Actor: Antonio Banderas, Pain and Glory/Dolor y gloria

Best Director: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, The Young Ahmed

Best Screenplay: Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma

Special Mention of the Jury: It Must Be Heaven, Elia Suleiman

Camera d’Or: Our Mothers, César Díaz

Short Film Palme d’Or: The Distance Between Us And The Sky, Vasilis Kekatos

Special Mention of the Jury: Monstruo Dios, Agustina San

Queer Palm (Feature): Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma

Queer Palm (Short): The Distance Between Us And The Sky, Vasilis Kekatos

Palm Dog: Brandy, The dog in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (that belongs to Brad Pitt's character Cliff Booth)

FIPRESCI awards.

The Lighthouse (dir. Robert Eggers), won the Cannes Film Festival critics’ award for best first or second features in Directors’ Fortnight and Critics Week. The award was announced Saturday by the Intl. Federation of Film Critics (Fipresci).

Fipresci also honored Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven as the best film in competition and Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole as best film in the sidebar Un Certain Regard.

Terrence Malick’s Competition film Hidden Life won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury.

[Chris Knipp]

Bong Joon-ho, director of Parasite/기생충, takes the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2019 [Photo Stéphane Mahé/Reuters]

Awards comments.

It's exciting that a Korean film at last won the Palme d'Or. Last year my favorite non-English language film was Lee Chang-dong's Burning. It's also great that newcomers outside the mainstream got top recognition, with the Grand Prix to Atlantics, debut feature directed by Mati Diop, an African woman, and the Jury Prize to Les Miseerables, directed by a black son of the banlieue, Ladj Ly (who said in the press conference he chooses still to live there). Bacurau's Kleber Mendonça Filho is no newcomer, but Brazil is another country whose superb filmmaking deserves more recognition, and this is a wild, crazy genre-piece of a film.

An interesting tweet;

Robbie Collin
(@robbiereviews)
Like this selection very much indeed. Portrait/Fire seems undervalued, but at least it got something. Maybe give Sciamma director and Tarantino screenplay and it would have been perfect. #Cannes2019

Yes, good idea - nothing can make up for Tarantino's only winning the Palm Dog! But he seemed gracious and pleased to have won that, or the dog' a pitt bull called Brandy, to have. After all the talk about how much they loved Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and the critical popularity of Pain and Glory, these were undervalued, especially considering that Almodóvar has been making movies for a long time and never won a top Cannes prize.

Another interesting tweet:

Donald Clarke
(@DonaldClarke63)
Two Asian films about families of eccentric con artists win the Palme in consecutive years. WHAT CAN IT MEAN? #CANNES2019

[Chris Knipp]

Awards Dissent.


Alejandro González Iñárritu, center, president of Jury, and winners at Cannes: Ladj Ly to his right, Bong Joon-ho to his left

Did the Cannes Competition Jury led by Alejandro González Iñárritu go astray?

Apart from Tarantino - whose new movie was the hottest ticket at the festival - going home empty-handed (unless you count the Dog Palm), there were dissenters about the Competition Jury's choices. In France a prominent opinion piece in Le Figaro by Etienne Sorin and Florence Vierron says except for the Palme d'Or for Parasite and the Jury Prize for Les Misérables the Jury went wrong. The strong presence of directors (Pawel Pawlikoswski, Yorgos Lanthimos, Kelly Reichardt, Robin Campillo and Alice Rohrwacher) on the Jury, they say, helped them choose one of their own. Otherwise though the quality of the Competition selections was high, they say, the awards don't reflect it. They particularly take issue with the Best Actress to Emily Beecham in Little Joe the film of Jessica Hauser. They say she is "an actress they pulled out of the shadows from a film made with the cold eye of a fish." Little Joe, Hauser's film, scored 2.3, near the bottom of the Jury Grid.

Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson talks about how Cannes reflects they way the Oscars will go. In particular, Banderas may have a great chance for Best Actor there too, despite his performance being in Spanish. Tarantino's Once Upon a time...in Hollywood will be big, and Eggers' The Lighthouse will have much weight at Oscar time especially in the acting categories, Lawson says. Admittedly, however worthy, most of the other top-award Cannes films are unlikely to be on the radar in the US


The red carpet for Mad Max: Fury Road, Cannes 2015. Photo Tristan Fewings/French Select [Vox]

Cannes primer. Why all the fuss?

It's not too late to bone up on what the Cannes Festival is all about, why it's so important, and how it's organized. Vox's Alissa Wilkinson has a little piece laying all that out in an up to date fashion, even how to pronounce "Cannes." It's important to note that Cannes isn't just the most prestigious festival but the biggest, most important film market, and that it's a press and industry event for which unlike Sundance, Toronto, or New York, etc., the public can't buy tickets, though they can ogle, and attend evening screenings down by the beach, and there are a limited number of cinephile badges.

[Chris Knipp]

The rightness of the dominance of Cannes.

"The French are very serious about film, and rightly so; the art of cinema owes much of its development to France. So it’s fitting that the country is the home for the world’s most prestigious film festival. And though their commitment to tradition sometimes runs afoul of progressive ideas about dress codes and film distribution, there’s little doubt that Cannes will retain its spot atop the festival hierarchy for years to come." - Alissa Wilkinson, Vox

I've never been to Cannes, but my annual visits to Paris in fall and sometimes spring have always reaffirmed a sense that cinema deeply matters in France and is uniquely honored and respected there.


Alain Delon receiving special Palm at Cannes

The special Palme d'Or for Alain Delon

You may recall there was some controversy over Alain Delon's receiving an honorary Palm for his work as an actor since 1957 due to reports of his behavior and views and a petition signed by over 26,000 people opposing the award. But Festivalpresident Thierry Frémaux declared that this was not the Nobel Prize and the award would go ahead he got the award, and wept when he received it. See the thumbnail bio of Delon on IMDb. See also Sheena Scott's Forbes article about Delon's career and the award. One can discuss this issue endlessly, but even if Delon has expressed reprehensible views they are not expressed in his work, which shines through his performances for some of the world's greatest directors. He was not Leni Riefenstahl. And even her Nazi propaganda has to be acknowledged for its impressive artistry. Sometimes one must recognize artistic work and not confuse it with the person who does it. The gender parity issue, however, is one that Cannes has to confront more effectively.