CANNES Festival 2019

[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.

[Chris Knipp]

Last year's final Cannes Jury Grid.

I just saw David Robert Mitchell's Cannes 2018 Competition film Under the Silver Lake, which has been practically hushed up here; I never did get to see it in a theater and had to settle for streaming. Its Metascore is so terrible (59%) compared to an excellent AlloCiné press rating (3.9), evidence of critical love in France, I thought I'd check last year's final Cannes Screen Daily Jury Grid, which will simultaneously be a review of last year's Competition. And we can see how the Competition films ranked with that European cross section of critics. Under the Silver Lake didn't do that badly. In the field of 21, it's sixth from the bottom, in fact above Labaki's Capernaum, which got the Jury Prize. But of course the awards didn't strictly adhere to these ratings, or Lee Chang-dong's Burning (my personal favorite of all these), which got a record high score for the Jury Grid, of 3.8 - no film on the Grid had ever scored that high - would have gotten the top prize (it didn't get any Competition Jury award but did get the Competition FIPRESCI Prize, which is important but doesn't get as much publicity). Notice Spike Lee's BlacKKKlansman ranks ninth here, yet won the Grand Prix, lucky for Spike.

How many have I seen by now? Well, I've still missed six, but for not having been anywhere near Cannes ever that's not bad, and also reflects pretty good availability Stateside. I would like to see Nuri Bilge Ceylan's The Wild Pear Tree, obviously, and also Serebrennikov's Leto, maybe Dvortsevoy's Ayka. Late Godard leaves me cold. I could have lived without Knife + Heart or Girls of the Sun (both which I have seen). Youmeddine, though some thought it was premature to include in the prestigious Competition list (that goes for the two below it), actually has charm. (I caught it by seeing some films at the London Film Festival in the fall.) Burning is still my favorite, and I love Ash Is Purest White and Cold War, both of which I have re-watched with pleasure. I got a lot more out of Sorry Angel in a second viewing. I've seen Capernaum twice too (it's overlong and repetitious and sentimental but also amazing).

Here's the closing 2018 grid in order of rank. Below that is the actual Jury Grid as it appears in Screen Daily.

3.8 Burning (Lee Chang-dong)
3.2 Shoplifters (Koreeda)
3 The Image Book (Godard)
2.9 The Wild Pear Tree (Ceylan)
2.9 Happy As Lazzaro (Rohrwacher)
2.9 Ash Is Purest White (Jia Zhang-ke)
2.9 Cold War (Pawlekowski)
2.6 Three Faces (Panahi)
2.5 BlacKKKlansman
2.4 Leto (Serebrennikov)
2.4 Asako I & II (Hamaguchi)
2.3 Sorry Angel (Honoré)
2.3 Dogman (Garrone)
2.1 Ayka (Dvortsevoy)
2.1 At War [En guerre] (Stéphane Brizé)
2. Under the Silver Lake (Mitchell)
1.9 Capernaum (Labaki)
1.8 Everybody Knows (Farhadi)
1.8 Yomeddine (Shawky)
1.6 Knife + Heart (Yann Gonzalez)
1.0 Girls of the Sun (Husson)

[Chris Knipp]

This year's final Jury Grid.

The last one here was missing It Must Be Heaven (Suleiman) and Sibyl (Justine Triet). Here is the final one with all the ratings of the ten critics.