Sweden’s Östlund wins second Palme d’Or for social satire “Triangle of Sadness”
Ruben Östlund took home the top prize at the 75th Cannes Film Festival last Saturday for his “Triangle of Sadness”, a satire on the super-rich who ended up on a desert island, and joins the elite club with two-time Palme d’Or winners.
Five years after winning in Cannes with “The Square”, which made fun of the contemporary art world, Östlund has expanded the same format with another biting – some would say harshly – satirical comedy, this time with a view to the superficial and the obscene rich Right. “Triangle of Sadness” is named after the V-shaped wrinkle lines that appear between the eyebrows with age or stress. It elicited laughter from the audience during the premiere at the Cannes Grand Théâtre Lumière.
The world’s most glittering showcase for the films hosted its first full-scale edition after the pandemic forced a no-show 2020 and a scaled-down July collection next year. Inevitably, the war that raged in Ukraine was large over the procedure, which framed the conversation just as it affected the film lineup.
Prior to the festival, jury leader Vincent Lindon had expressed his preference for “films that say something about the world they are made in”. His judges duly delivered with a politically minded Palme d’Or. Östlund’s latest complicated satire, starring Harris Dickinson, Charlbi Dean and Woody Harrelson, was not to everyone’s liking, several critics thought it was too harsh and subtle. But film critics and jurors are rarely the same.
Östlund’s second Gold Palm means that he now joins a selected club with two-time winners, which include the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Shoei Imamura, Emir Kusturica, Ken Loach and the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. The latter duo won a special 75th anniversary award on Saturday for their latest socially realistic drama “Tori and Lokita”, about two teenage immigrants from Benin who face a desperate situation in Belgium.
Boyfriend friendship
Last year, the French body-horror thriller “Titane” won the main prize, making director Julia Decournau the only female filmmaker ever to win Palme. There were five films directed by women in the main competition this year, a record for Cannes but still a low percentage compared to other international festivals. They included France’s Claire Denis, who took second place in the Grand Prix for “Stars at Noon”, an erotic political drama set in Nicaragua.
Denis, who also won the director’s award at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, shared his Grand Prix with Belgium’s Lukas Dhont, whose “Close” brought many to tears with his tender, tragic story of boyhood friendship that turned sour. At 31, Dhont was the youngest director in the race, 53 years younger than Polish veteran Jerzy Skolimowski, who won the jury’s award for his donkey fable “EO”, a beautiful tribute to Robert Bresson’s classic “Au Hasard Balthazard” from 1966. It was also a joint prize, shared with “The Eight Mountains” by Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen, a story about unspoken feelings between childhood friends that echoed with Dhont’s “Close”.
The festival’s global reach was highlighted in this year’s second awards, which rewarded the rich and diverse selection of films from the Middle East and Asia. The French-based Iranian actress took the lead female lead role in “Holy Spider” by Ali Abbasi, about a serial killer who wants to free the streets from prostitutes in Iran’s religious city of Mashhad. Best Male Lead went to South Korea’s Song-Kong ho, of “Parasite” fame, for her role in “Broker”, a family drama about “baby box” adoptions directed by Japan’s Gold Palm Award winner 2018 Hirokazu Kore-eda.
Another South Korean, “Old Boy” helmet Park Chan-wook, won best director for his clever neo-noir “Decision to Leave,” about a detective who falls for a murder suspect. Best Screenplay went to Tarik Saleh for “Boy from Heaven”, a thriller set in Cairo’s historic Al-Azhar Mosque, which explores oblique links between religion and politics.
In the shadow of the war
The catastrophe that took place in Ukraine was a recurring one throughout the festival, which began with a surprise speech by the country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, who called on the film world to revive Charlie Chaplin’s spirit and take on the world’s great dictators. .
Films by and about Ukrainians had a prominent place in this year’s line-up, focusing on the devastating amount of war, both then and now. The screening of “Mariupolis 2” by the late Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravičius, just weeks after he was assassinated by Russian forces while filming Ukraine’s martyrdom of Mariupol, marked an emotional climax for a festival set in the shadow of Vladimir Putin’s war.
Cannes organizers prevented Russians affiliated with the government from the festival. However, they opposed calls for a general boycott of Russian artists, and welcomed Kirill Serebrennikov to the main event for the third time – praising his anti-Kremlin credentials. The move upset many Ukrainian delegates and sparked heated debates about what qualifies as “dissident” art and whether Russian culture should be “suspended” altogether.
Anti-war protests led to an unusually politicized year on the red carpet, where a woman took off her clothes during a premiere to condemn the Russian forces’ rape of civilians in Ukraine. In another, unrelated protest, feminist activists lit flares and unfurled a giant banner on the red carpet to highlight the scourge of genocide in France.
Tom Cruise flies by
As a bastion of art cinema and the world’s most glamorous film festival, the Cannes Film Festival must always find a balance between author worship and Hollywood star power – and this year the Croisette hosted more star effect than in several years. The festival reached an early peak with Tom Cruise’s return, 30 years after he last walked the red carpet in Cannes. His turn in “Top Gun: Maverick” received rave reviews and was hailed with a spectacular flight past by the French Air Force.
Cannes 2022 was a great year for music lovers, Baz Luhrmann shook things up with his splashy biopic “Elvis”. Another rock’n’roll legend, Jerry Lee Lewis, was the focus of Ethan Coen’s first film without his brother Joel, while critics were blown away by an extremely immersive documentary about David Bowie, “Moonage Daydream”.
Some of the biggest buzz happened outside the main competition, not least with Saim Sadiq’s “Joyland”, the first Pakistani film in Cannes’ official selection and a daring portrait of a transgender dancer. It won the unofficial “Queer Palm” for best LGBT film and took the silver medal jury’s prize in the festival’s Un Certain Regard sidebar. From the same category, Riley Keough chose the Cannes Caméra d’Or for the best spruce film with her “War Pony”, a story about old age about Oglala Lakota boys navigating life on their South Dakota reservation.
While the host country picked up some silver, French films won praise for tackling sensitive topics from the immediate and more distant past. The traumatic aftermath of the 2015 terrorist attack in Paris was the focus of Cédric Jimenez “November” and Alice Winocour’s “Paris Memories” – one mapped the hunt for the perpetrators, the other explored survivors’ efforts to overcome the trauma. Earlier in the festival, the devastating human costs of war and colonization were revealed in Philippe Faucon’s Algerian war film “Les Harkis” and Omar Sy starring “Father and Soldier”, about the North African riflemen who were snatched from their homes and forced to fight for colonial power in the trenches during the first world war.