The Palme d’Or for the best feature-length film of the main competition section was awarded to The Square (France-Sweden-Denmark-Germany), a satirical comedy directed by Ruben Ostlund from Sweden.
Christian, the protagonist of the film, is a curator at a museum of contemporary art. He is divorced with two daughters. One day, Christian has his phone and wallet stolen. Having traced the device with the help of an app, he goes off in the company of a colleague to administer justice in a poor district of Stockholm. He places in mailboxes a printed warning “I know you stole my phone and wallet” and describes a place where the items are to be returned. However, the events unfold in a completely unexpected direction. Critics describe The Square as a “mocking art satire on contemporary art and the vanity of human hopes for each other.” It stars Claes Bang, Elisabeth Moss, Dominic West, and Terry Notary. For Ostlund (born on April 13, 1974 on the island of Styrso, graduated from film school in Gothenburg in 2001), whose highest previous awards were merely Golden Bear for the short film Incident (2010) and the Jury Prize of the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes for Force Majeure (2014), The Square’s success came as a truly unexpected triumph. Incidentally, one of the first international festivals to screen Ostlund’s feature-length debut The Guitar Mongoloid (2004) was Kyiv’s Molodist.
Overall, 19 films took part in the main competition in Cannes. The second most prestigious Grand Prix was awarded to 120 Beats per Minute, a drama about the lives of HIV-infected people in Paris in the 1990s, directed by Robin Campillo (France), while the Jury Prize was awarded to Andrey Zvyagintsev from Russia for Loveless, a drama about a teenager who runs away from his dysfunctional family.
Sofia Coppola finally won her first Cannes award, it being the Award for Best Director. Her film The Beguiled is a remake of a 1971 costume drama (the older film starred Clint Eastwood as the leading actor, while Colin Farrell plays that part in the remake), with the events unfolding during the American Civil War.
Award of the prize for the best screenplay to the 58-year-old Lynne Ramsay from Scotland was surprising because her film You Were Never Really Here (US-UK-France) about a killer who tries to save a young girl from pedophiles is, in fact, still unfinished. However, Ramsay’s visual style is so interesting and compelling that this incompleteness itself is seen as a feature of her individual manner. Also, Joaquin Phoenix was recognized as the best actor for his role of a melancholic killer in this film.
Ramsay shared the Award for Best Screenplay with Yorgos Lanthimos, a brilliant representative of the Greek surrealism. His film The Killing of a Sacred Deer (US-UK-Ireland) is a fantasy based on Euripides’s dramas and starring Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman; the latter, by the way, appeared in as many as four projects during the festival, and was honored with a special 70th Anniversary Prize on May 28. Meanwhile, Diane Kruger was recognized as the best actress for playing the part of a woman who lost her relatives in Fatih Akin’s film In the Fade (Germany).
As predicted, new film of the renowned European director Michael Haneke Happy End (France-Austria-Germany) won no prizes; apparently, having won two consecutive Palmes d’Or for The White Ribbon and Amour, the master took a less careful approach to his work.
Two movies involving Ukraine were screened in Cannes this year: Serhii Loznytsia’s feature film A Gentle Creature (France-Germany-The Netherlands-Lithuania-Ukraine-Russia) in the main competition section and Frost (Poland-Ukraine-Lithuania-France) by Sarunas Bartas from Lithuania in the Directors’ Fortnight. None won any prizes, but both had success with the public and (especially A Gentle Creature) a good press at the festival.
Hopefully, we will be able to watch movies by Loznytsia and Bartas as well as the Grand Prix winners of Cannes in Ukraine as soon as this year.
The 70th Cannes Film Festival was held on May 17-28. The eminent Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar presided over the main competition’s jury.
