There was a Hollywood ending on the French Riviera on Saturday evening as Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was awarded the Palme d’Or, top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
It’s the first time Panahi has won the festival’s highest honor, a sensational outcome after years of personal and professional adversity. The dissident director has endured multiple run-ins with the Iranian government, including imprisonment, most recently from 2022 to 2023.
The director of “No Bears,” “Taxi,” “This Is Not A Film” and more has continued to make movies, despite a ban, though he has not been able to attend the festival for over two decades. In 2010, he was due to serve on the competition jury at Cannes but incarceration prevented him traveling to France. The festival kept an empty chair for him, and that year, actress Juliette Binoche held up a sign bearing his name as she accepted the award for best actress. Now fifteen years later, a jury headed by Binoche awarded his film “It Was Just an Accident” the Palme.
Panahi has reportedly said his film was partly inspired by his most recent incarceration. “It Was Just an Accident” features ex-political prisoners who kidnap a man they believe to be their former interrogator, though they are riven with doubts – and doubts about what to do with him.
Elsewhere, the festival awarded “Sentimental Value” by Joachim Trier the Grand Prix (runner-up), and the Jury Prize was shared by “Sirat,” directed by Oliver Laxe, and “The Sound of Falling,” by Mascha Schilinkski.
Best actor went to Wagner Moura for “The Secret Agent” by Kleber Mendonça Filho, who also won best director. Best actress was awarded to Nadia Melliti for “La Petite Dernière.” “Resurrection” by Bi Gan was awarded a Special Prize, while best screenplay was handed to Cannes stalwarts Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne for “Young Mothers.”
The awards recognized plenty of films that debuted toward the tail end of the program in what turned out to be a starry but lopsided year in terms of critical acclaim. Continue on for more festival highlights from a raucous and divisive year on La Croisette.
A French dispatch
“Is this what the end of the world looks like?” a man wonders amid the bare expanse of Moroccan desert. Next to him his friend shrugs. “I think it’s been the end of the world for a long time,” he replies.
Portends of doom seeped into the fabric of the Cannes Film Festival this year. An always bustling event threatened to spill over into febrile territory as an agitated world tried to make sense of the moment up on the big screen.
Even the festival’s big blockbuster wasn’t immune to the mood. “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” a continuation of 2023’s “Dead Reckoning” storyline and AI baddie, had Tom Cruise facing down nuclear Armageddon. In another year it might’ve felt like escapist fun, but the plot, inflected with paranoia between states and a collapsing world order, hit a little too close to home.
More prosaic but possibly more likely was the fate of the aforementioned hippies in Oliver Laxe’s “Sirat.” They have decamped from Europe to Africa in pursuit of techno-fueled reveries, a festival in the Sahara, while the world slowly descends into global war. With them is Sergi López as a father looking for his missing daughter, with his son in tow. Together their journey into the desert plays out with “The Wages of Fear”-like peril, both tragic and thrilling. But as much as this ragtag gang might try to insulate itself from the world, reality finds cruel ways of biting back.
From dancing plagues to plague itself: Laxe’s intimate view of apocalypse found an unlikely twin in Julia Ducournau’s “Alpha,” her hotly anticipated follow up to Palme d’Or winner “Titane.” Rust-colored dunes and swirling dust are present here too, albeit with a grim phantasmagoric edge. Ducournau tamps down the body horror to tell the story of Alpha, a French teenager who returns from a party one day with a stick-and-poke tattoo. This would be concerning enough for her doctor mother (Golshifteh Farahani), but it’s cataclysmic given there’s an ongoing bloodborne pandemic turning its victims to stone. The AIDS allegory is not subtle, though Ducournau’s screenplay contains more sleight of hand. Fusing past and present and increasingly focused on Alpha’s junkie uncle (a tremendous Tahar Rahim), the film’s rumination on trauma, and the resurfacing of memory when a crisis threatens to repeat itself, is thundering and desperately sad. (The AIDS crisis was also integral to Carla Simón’s auto-fictional “Romeria,” about a daughter searching for information about her dead father.)
US director Ari Aster saw no need for allegory in his pandemic movie, “Eddington.” A blunt force satire – the kind that makes Ruben Ostlund look understated – Aster took aim at Covid-19, arguing it supercharged grievances in a divided nation. Set in New Mexico and starring Joaquin Phoenix as a conservative small-town sheriff squaring off with Pedro Pascal’s liberal mayor, the film takes potshots across political divides, nailing some targets better than others. Ironically, the film is so indiscriminate in its ire that commentators of all stripes have found something to back in its politics – somewhat proving the director’s point: we’re all choosing our own truths these days.
At a press conference for the film, Aster was asked if all that was left for the United States was a decent into civil war. Such are the times, he gave a sincere answer, while Pascal unleashed a cri du coeur on the protection of migrants’ rights. It wasn’t the only brush with US politics: earlier in the festival, honorary Palme d’Or recipient Robert De Niro had some choice words for his regular bête noir, President Trump. Richard Linklater and Wes Anderson sounded off about a proposed US tariff on foreign film productions. It has been, among other things, a politically charged Cannes, even if the festival’s new guidelines prevented acts of protest extending to the red carpet, as they so often have in the past.
By the festival’s midpoint, what I’d watched could’ve been labeled “bleak week,” though that’s not to say there wasn’t humor and beauty to be found among the gloom. Lynne Ramsay gave audiences both with her much-anticipated “Die, My Love,” starring Jennifer Lawrence, making her Cannes debut as an actor, and Robert Pattinson, who’s becoming a festival regular.
Lawrence’s new mother Grace is anything but as an irascible New Yorker who moves to rural Montana with her son and husband Jackson, played by Robert Pattinson. Their run down home paired with her increased isolation pushes Grace into psychotic episodes at turns violent, at others funny, as she tears strips off both her husband and the furnishings. Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!” (2017) unleashed a cruel world on Lawrence’s unnamed parent, and here the actor gets to return the favor. It’s bravura stuff, perfectly matched to Ramsay’s punk sensibilities. Dark and horny and not for everyone, for those who found its wavelength “Die, My Love” was a festival highlight. MUBI is banking on it finding an audience, swooping in to buy distribution rights in a reported $24 million deal.
Another family drama was “The Chronology of Water,” Kristen Stewart’s feature debut as director. Her adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir, long in the works, was practically a wet print when it screened late on May 16. “Let’s rip off the band aid and watch this f–king movie,” Stewart told a packed house from the stage, and painful and cathartic the film proved to be. Starring Imogen Poots as a survivor of parental sexual abuse turned ascendant writer with addiction issues, Stewart matches Yuknavitch’s beat poet rhythms and keen observations with a jagged, looping timeline and some lovely image-making. Stewart seems aware of “Chronology’s” commercial limitations, but one senses it’s only a matter of time before she returns to the director’s chair.
Also making a splash was “My Father’s Shadow,” the first Nigerian film in Cannes’ official selection. Set in Lagos in the wake of the turbulent 1993 general election, the movie is led by a towering Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù as a political organizer and father to two young boys, through whose eyes we see a country on the brink of change. To them, the big city is as enchanting and mysterious as their father, whose absence in their life has stung both parent and child. A tear-jerker that never feels like it’s pulling your strings, the semi-autobiographical film written by siblings Wale Davies and director Akinola Davies Jr. garnered positive reviews across the board – rare by this festival’s standards.
Decidedly more upbeat was the new Wes Anderson, who applied wit and whimsy to “The Phoenician Scheme,” a pastel-hued exploration of corporate espionage. Richard Linklater directed in French for the first time with “Nouvelle Vague,” his breezy and enjoyable recreation of the making of Jean-Luc Goddard’s 1960 debut “À bout de souffle,” otherwise known as “Breathless.” Spike Lee stripped the melancholy (and the intricacies) from Akira Kurosawa’s “High To Low” in his reinterpretation “Highest 2 Lowest,” casting Denzel Washington as a music mogul caught in a ransom plot gone sideways. Lee’s new joint may be uneven, but A$AP Rocky’s rapper-turned-kidnapper and Washington share some electric scenes in the home stretch worth the price of admission alone (that’s if you can see this future Apple TV+ release on a big screen).
If critical consensus among the competition films was short on the ground in the first week, a swell of praise rose up in the backend for Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident” and Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value.”
Panahi’s film is about former Iranian political prisoners who kidnap their former interrogator (or have they?) and must decide what to do next. In his first interview since his release from prison in 2023, Panahi, Iran’s most famous dissident filmmaker, said he drew on some of his own experiences as an inmate. Trier, from Norway, and coming off the back of two Oscar nominations for “The Worst Person in the World,” reunited with Renate Reinsve for a domestic drama about a vain filmmaker (Stellan Skarsgard) and his two grownup daughters with many legitimate daddy issues. Both will be distributed by Neon in the US.
As bad luck would have it, when Panahi’s film screened to critics this writer was trapped on an airplane as a minor apocalypse descended upon Nice airport. Lightning lit up the airfield and rain flooded the tarmac. A different kind of show. News of Trier’s latest triumph and the 19-minute standing ovation that followed was jealously read about on social media the following day. Alas, one cannot see everything here. Kleber Mendonca Filho’s “The Secret Agent” and Mascha Schilinski’s “The Sound of Falling” both fell victim to scheduling issues. The festival is too big, the program too packed, the venture too expense. Screenings run from 8:30 a.m. until the small hours, yet there’s never enough hours in the day.
Cannes is a strange beast at the best of times. On the cattle market of the red carpet, photographers scream at models and actors to get their shot, even getting physical, as was the case with Denzel Washington. But it’s also a city where the cream of world cinema can walk the streets fabulously unbothered. Lynne Ramsay can make her way through the old town area Le Suquet without a selfie request, the day after her red-hot premiere. I bumped into Japanese Palme d’Or winner Hirokazu Kore-eda twice in the space of 24 hours. At the joint afterparty for “My Father’s Shadow” and BDSM biker romance “Pillion,” Alexander Skarsgård strode around in his giant Saint Laurent boots making small talk, while Oscar-winner Daniel Kaluuya, here on jury duty, worked the dancefloor. For all its veneration of filmmakers and stars, the festival has a way of making their presence passé. Of course they’re here. Why wouldn’t they be? It’s Cannes, stupid.
Now the circus has pulled down the tent for the year; the star attractions are leaving town. Cannes can resume its normal business of sun, sand and corporate events. For the film industry though, there are deals to be finalized, release dates to set, marketing campaigns and awards season strategies to be planned. All over the world wheels are in motion. The first act is done, but the show has only just begun.
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