Cannes Do: Winners Wrap
[Editor's Note: Express' Arion Berger has returned from France and now that's she's over her jetlag, gives us a wrap-up of the winning films at the Cannes Film Festival.]
THE CANNES 2006 AWARDS results are in, and in the phrase of many a French philosopher, are you kidding me? No amount of speculation can fully anticipate the dodges, compensations and snubs that make up each year’s list of winners. Cannes juries are famously unpredictable, and a fair amount of horse-trading and strategic voting goes into the process; the jury has been known to make up awards to reward a film or director getting passed over elsewhere. The process is a Cracker Jack box of nationalism, sentimentality, standard-bearing and punishment that almost always has a surprise at the bottom. The ineffably Cannes-ian thing about it, though, is the twist is sometimes too perverse to even consider.
As everyone knows by now, Ken Loach‘s “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” seen here, has won the Palme D’Or, the biggest of the three big prizes at the festival. Loach’s handsome green-and-brown period piece about farmboys of Ireland rising up against English oppression in the 1920s plays not a single unexpected note — everything about it is meticulously empathetic and high-minded, with none of the director’s trademark faux-verite, his messy camera following an outraging mess as it messily devolves to the point of contagious abjection. Dudes, if high-mindedness is the goal, what happened to all the votes for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s “Babel” (a film whose obnoxious schematics become more irritating upon reflection)? Don’t you see how We Are All Connected? Brad Pitt, for heaven’s sake, acting, acting, acting as if his life depended on it!
Pedro Almodovar‘s “Volver” could have queered the mix, considering that the Spanish master has never won the Palme D’Or and has emerged in this field as the Grand Old Man of cinema. Add to that a film that is a return to his fizzy, woman-centric early comedies and the fact that he is at the absolute peak of his control, and the Best Screenplay prize is poor compensation. 
(He has won Best Director in the past.) Almodovar’s fine slate of six lead actresses, playing widows and spinsters in a windswept, man-free town on the plains of that ancient dream-factory, La Mancha, stole his thunder by receiving a mass Best Actress award. Congratulations, Penelope Cruz, pictured at left, Carmen Maura, Lola Duenas, Chus Lampreave, Yohana Cobo and Blanca Portillo — you deserve it. As for Pedro, maybe he’ll start making films only every other year until the jury starts to miss him.
While Almodovar may be the best director whose wares were on display this year, Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki is surely a close second. He got a load of golden bupkis; perhaps the voters are fed up with a man of such talent peddling the same psychologically laughable sentimentality year after year. Inarritu ended up winning Best Director, in fact. Which is fine, he’s young — make something as good as “Amores Perros,” and we’ll talk.
By the end of the festival, it was clear that the American spoilers — “Marie Antoinette,” “Fast Food Nation,” and Lord knows the hated “Southland Tales” — didn’t stand a chance. But amid all the arguing for or against these, it was conceivable that a dark horse could have stepped in and stolen the vote as a compromise. My hope was for “Flanders,” Bruno Dumont‘s crushing, highly stylized story of rural soldiers caught up in a war they don’t understand. The film did sneak in a triumph, winning the Grand Prize, which is not the Palme D’Or, but not chicken feed, either. What it is, exactly, no one knows for sure.
The other potential sneak-thief was “Indigenes” by Rachid Bouchareb, which won a well-deserved ensemble Best Actor award for its cast. With the exception of thinky Mexican horror-meister Guillermo del Toro‘s “Labyrinth of Pan,” which I was heartbroken to miss, “Indigenes” was the last biggie in competition to screen — a vote-killer, as all the most-hyped movies are bunched up in the first and second thirds of the festival, when everyone is fresh and not distracted by how much their feet hurt. A fictionalization of an episode of France’s past that has long needed telling, Bouchareb’s film follows young North Africans conscripted into fighting for La France in World War II. Treated like second-class citizens, mocked, abused, denied promotion, they fought fiercely and bravely for a country whose culture they knew nothing about and whose politics squished their own land under its thumb. It’s a war movie in the solid, moving, heartily professional mode — old-fashioned, yes, but without a single false note, and the actors turn in performances of convincing depth. There wasn’t a better ensemble on display outside of Almodovar’s steel-spined dizzy dames, so the jury got that right.
The Jury Prize went to Andrea Arnold‘s “Red Road,” a Scottish film about a woman who runs a surveillance camera and spots a man from her past. I don’t know much more about it, except critics were respectful — “well-made,” doncha know — and I was so fed up with We Are All Connectedness, this year’s motif, by that time that I skipped it.
Biggest shame: “Marie Antoinette” by Sofia Coppola. American audiences will get it; you’ll see. Honorable mention goes to Richard Kelly‘s “Southland Tales,” for being 1) universally loathed and 2) batpoop crazy.
Best films not in competition: “Bamako” by Abderrahmane Sissako; “Taxidermia” by Gyorgi Palfi; “El-Banate Dol” by Tahani Rached.
Biggest relief that it didn’t win anything: Too many to mention. See you next year!
Photo of Cruz by Valery Hache/Getty Images
