The Cannes Film Festival is over for another year. As tradition dictates, Sunday night saw the awards dished out on the steps of the Palais, with Michael Haneke scooping the Palme d’Or for The White Ribbon. But you have to ask yourself this: what do the likes of Isabelle Huppert, Paolo Sorrentino, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, John Boorman and Hanif Kureishi know compared to the sensitivity and insight of your very own LWLies’ correspondents? The answer, of course, is diddly fuck all, so we’ve compiled our own lists of awards for the 2009 vintage. Let the disagreements commence…
Jonathan Crocker
Best Film: Fish Tank
Move over, Dardennes. Yeah, you heard us. Andrea Arnold comes up with a near-perfect social-realist drama that’s funny, fragile, brutal, emotional and – best of all – British.
Honourable Mention: Enter The Void
Wow. Talk about the ultimate trip. Must, must, must be seen on the big screen. And in a very comfy seat.
Best Director: Gaspar Noé
Who was expecting this? Enter The Void is the kind of virtuoso filmmaking that you just don’t see that often. Still too bloody long, mind. But this guy really might be something.
Best Actor: Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)
Far, far and away the best thing about QT’s overlong WWII romper, Waltz creates a funny, frightening Nazi uber-villain who only partly existed in the script. “Don’t forget the cream…”
Best Actress: Katie Jarvis (Fish Tank)
Discovered shouting at her boyfriend while waiting for a train in London, the non-pro Essex girl delivers a raw, daring, delicate performance. Since when do you have to frig yourself off against a tree to win Best Actress in Cannes?
Most Shocking Moment: Dropping the baby, falling down the stairs with the baby, then dropping the TV on the baby. Take your pick from Precious. Runners up? Blood-spunking in Antichrist. Gaspar Noé’s giant cock in Enter The Void.
Biggest Surprise: Crying like a baby all through Pixar’s Up. Four minutes of the sweetest, saddest cinema you’ll ever see in your life. If it made this stone-hearted writer want to blub like an infant, you don’t stand a chance.
Cannes Hero: Lars von Trier
Possibly the loveliest man in world cinema. Whatever it’s about, Antichrist is really one man’s battle with a depression that he refused to be beaten by. Deadly serious on-screen therapy, a cheeky joke and von Trier at his most vulnerable.
Cannes Villain: Any ‘critic’ who slagged off Lars von Trier. At the post-screening press conference, one Brit tabloid writer rudely bawled out that von Trier justify his film. Von Trier told him where to shove it, as did another journalist. Justice.
Matt Bochenski
Best Film: I went to Cannes to discover a masterpiece – something secret and special that hit me in an emotionally honest and unpredictable way. I may not have experienced that exactly, but the closest I came was with Ounie Lecomte’s A Brand New Life. It took me about three days to get over this story of a young Korean girl abandoned by her father in a Catholic orphanage, and her struggle to understand and accept her fate. If I write another word about it, I’m going to tear up again. An honourable mention has to go Lars, too. For its provocation, its raw shock value and the outrage it caused up and down the Croisette, Antichrist was (for better or worse) a reminder of film’s distinct power to engage.
Best Director: I was impressed by Alejandro Amenabar’s metaphysical vision of the ancient world in Agora (though the effort was wasted on this mediocre script), but I think the most impressive work at the festival was Haim Tabakman’s sensitive handling of Eyes Wide Open. This potentially inflammatory story of the love affair between two men in an orthodox Jewish community was superbly realised – a tremendous confluence of restraint and smouldering desire. Tabakman orchestrated the small details so beautifully that the larger resonances seemed to take care of themselves.
Best Actor: Zohar Strauss for Eyes Wide Open. In his first ever film, Strauss is exceptional as the butcher whose friendship with a young drifter awakes dormant desires. It’s a still, unshowy performance that simply oozes guilt, sadness and suffering. A special mention goes to some dude called Fabrice Yahaoui (or something) who posted pictures of himself all over the town with the tagline, ‘This guy is an actor – he fucking wants to act! Hire him.’ Good luck, mate.
Best Actress: Sae Ron Kim. Absolutely no contest. The best performance of the festival – hell, of the year – is this nine-year-old girl who absolutely devastates in Brand New Life. Words fail me. Do whatever it takes to see this performance.
Most Shocking Moment: There are so many to chose from, but I’m going to go for the bathroom scene in Dogtooth. An intense, claustrophobic atmosphere had been building all the way through this Greek film about two sisters and a brother who have been kept at home all their lives. But when it finally explodes, Kubrick-style, in a brightly lit bathroom, it had everyone in the audience covering their mouth.
Unsung Hero: Thierry Fremaux. The Delegate General of Cannes rocks up before each major screening to give a little intro. Even though I never understood a word he was saying, I think he’s awesome. I’m not sure why, but he reminds me of an old-fashioned circus clown (and I mean that as a compliment – honest).
Biggest Disappointment: That Jane Campion’s Bright Star, a turgid, middle-brow exercise in Quality Filmmaking, so successfully hoodwinked the general public. Cinema du papa is alive and well, and no one seems to care.
Sophie Ivan
Best Film: Bright Star
For a period romance with an all-too-familiar unhappy ending, Jane’s Campion’s comeback was a distinctly underwhelming prospect and potential damp squib. Yes, it’s everything I expected it to be, but so well-pitched it gets away with it. It bursts costume drama constraints via a stable of wittily scripted, uncharacterstically vital performances and a rich visual language which embroils the viewer in the shifts and seasons of Keats’ and Brawne’s world.
Best Director: Andrea Arnold
Jury prize winner Fish Tank seals Arnold’s status as a very British auteur: a little bit of Mike Leigh with a lot more laughs.
Best Actor: A cinematic two-hander (all the more impressive for the fact its largely improvised) between Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard in Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, playing a pair of estranged best friends who try to prove themselves to each other by setting about making a porn movie. I Love You, Man, this ain’t. Leonard, in particular, will have Owen Wilson running for the hills.
Best Actress: Leading Bright Star’s fantastic cast, Abbie Cornish is totally believable and sympathetic as Keats’ ‘minxtress’-cum-long-suffering girl next door, Fanny Brawne. Instead of anaemically reeling off every line with typically stilted period drama intonation, Cornish delivers every word like she means it.
Most Shocking (/Predictable) Moment: Charlotte Gainsbourg, doing her best to explain why (self-proclaimed) ‘best director in the world’, Lars Von Trier, is such a genius for making yet another emotionally and this time, literally, pornographic ode to suffering women.
Biggest Surprise/Disappointment: Broken Embraces
For being as beautiful and clever-clever as we’ve come to expect from Almodovar, yet failing to emotionally excite or engage. (That said, by my fourth day of binge-screening my tearducts had definitely run dry, so I question my capacity to emote by this point).
Cannes Hero: Mine goes to the nice lady who ushered me into to the last seat at the last screening of Humpday, despite her colleagues’ protestations that there were other, much more important people with ‘BUYYYYEURRRS” badges waiting angrily behind me.
Cannes Villain: Lars. Pffft. He wishes.
Jason Wood
I thought that Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon was by far the most accomplished film of a very average and underwhelming Cannes. A film in which dread and recrimination seep through every frame, it is a remarkable achievement and a fitting winner of the Palme d’Or.
I’d give an honourable mention to Police, Adjective. A Romanian police drama infused with a sly wit and a bracing lack of interest in drama and incident, the film has been described as a Romanian version of The Wire. The cinema of Nuri Bilge Ceylan is another apt point of reference. Mexican drama Daniel & Ana is also very much worth looking out for.
The best achievement in direction came courtesy of Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains. An account of Suleiman’s family history that takes in the present and the past, the synthesis of political conviction and Keatonesque humour is a high wire act Suleiman achieves in some style.
The best actor of the festival would for me have to be Michael Fassbender for his turns in Fish Tank and Inglourious Basterds. Two very different performances in two very different films. The best performance I saw from an actress again goes to Fish Tank and the amazing 17 year-old newcomer Katie Jarvis.
The most shocking moment I experienced was that Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void was actually deemend worthy of selection. A tedious, 150-minute exercise in Noë’s brand of adolescent, synthetic nihilism, the film demands much of its audience for very little reward.
