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FUJIFILM
ERNEST GILL REPORTS ON THE RAZZMATAZZ ALONG THE GLAMOROUS LA CROISETTE AT THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL
n eccentric Danish director was Adeclared persona non grata and
ordered to leave town, but his
film won an award. The Festival erupted into a cacophony of boos and applause when a Texan film scooped the Palme d’Or. The Croisette was awash with models in revealing pirate costumes. And Woody Allen was in town speaking French (sort of) to hype his Gala opener. Nobody can do it like the Cannes Film Festival can.
The acutely divided audience reaction was reserved for notori- ously reclusive Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life, a fantastical family drama, co-starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, and set in 1950s Texas.
Naturally, Malick did not turn up at the gala awards ceremony Sunday, May 22, after which jury president Robert De Niro, sporting a newly grown beard, said the epic had “the size, the importance, the intention, whatever you want to call it, that seemed to fit the prize”.
Kirsten Dunst won acting honours for her turn as a depressed bride facing the apocalypse in Melancholia by Danish bad boy Lars von Trier, who was expelled from the festival after making an awkward remark about his supposed pro Nazi sympathies to the concern of all.
“Well, what a week it’s been,” Dunst quipped as she accepted her award, noting that von Trier had
been banned while his film had been well and truly bouqueted.
Fellow Dane Nicolas Winding Refn claimed Best Director for his high-octane thriller Drive, starring Canada’s Ryan Gosling as a stunt driver who moonlights for armed robbers in what was probably the most commercially viable of the 20 Cannes contenders this year.
France’s Jean Dujardin, who charmed critics with his role as a fading 1920s film star in Michel Hazanavicius’s silent black-and- white feature The Artist, took the Best Actor laurel.
The runner-up Grand Prix was shared by Belgium’s Dardenne brothers for The Kid With A Bike about an abandoned boy and the woman bent on saving him, and Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, a tough and gritty police drama by Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
The competition featured a record four women film-makers but only French actress-director Maiwenn picked up a gong, the third-place Jury Prize for Polisse, about a closely knit Child Protection Unit of the Paris police.
Israeli director Joseph Cedar won the best screenplay prize for Footnote, which recounts the decades-long rivalry between a father-son pair of Talmudic scholars. Some of the biggest names in European cinema saw themselves
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