The awards ceremony in Cannes ended with a surprise. Paweł Pawlikowski with "Fatherland" and Ryusuke Hamaguchi with *Soudain* were the favourites, leading the critics’ rankings, closely followed by Andrey Zvyagintsev with "Minotaur". Cristian Mungiu’s *Fjord* was in the middle of the critics’ rankings. A well-made film with an intense moral dilemma, but not a contender for the Palme d’Or, was the general consensus. Earlier that afternoon, “Fjord” had already won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, which was entirely appropriate given the film’s religiously controversial subject matter.
Hardly anyone had expected Cristian Mungiu to win the Palme d’Or that evening. As we later heard, it was apparently a close call between “Fjord” and “Minotaur”, with Zvyagintsev having to settle for the Grand Prix. This is regrettable, as the Russian director had already narrowly missed out on the Palme d’Or twice before, with “Leviathan” (2014) and “Loveless” (2017). For me, “Minotaur” was without doubt the standout film of the competition. Given his brilliant performance, one could well have imagined Dmitriy Mazurov winning the Best Actor award. But there still seems to be a certain reluctance towards Russian directors and actors as long as they do not demonstratively distance themselves from Putin and the war in Ukraine.
The Best Actor award went to the two Belgians Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne, the lead actors in Lukas Dhont’s gay First World War drama “Coward”. It always strikes me as unfortunate and unfair to the craft of professional actors when amateurs like Macchia or, last year, Nadia Melliti (“The Youngest Daughter”) are honoured as best actors. The focus on queer cinema was also evident in the award for Best Director, which was shared equally between Paweł Pawlikowski for “Fatherland” and the two Javis, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, for “La bola negra”. Their retrospective on 80 years of queer history in Spain is painstakingly held together by the figure of the great poet Federico García Lorca. Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s “El ser querido” (The Beloved) would have been a more fitting winner. Yet the excellent film ultimately went home empty-handed.
“Soudain”, the first French production by the Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, also plays with a latent lesbian subtext in the story of an intense female friendship. Virginie Efira as the director of a care home and the model Tao Okamoto as a Japanese director in Paris jointly won the Silver Palm for Best Actresses. They talk for hours but the Japanese woman’s melodramatic death from cancer prevents the two from becoming a couple. With Léa Drucker (La vie d’une femme), Adèle Exarchopoulos (Garance) and the Russian Iris Lebedeva (Minotaur), there were more plausible contenders for the prize.
The award for Best Screenplay went to the French writer and director Emmanuel Marre, who in “Notre salut” addresses the collaboration of the Vichy regime under Marshal Pétain in a powerful yet never simplistic manner. That Valeska Grisebach’s nearly three-hour docu-fiction “Das geträumte Abenteuer” (The Dreamed Adventure) won the Jury Prize remains a mystery to me, just as last year’s Jury Prize for Mascha Schillinski’s “In die Sonne schauen” did. In Cannes, there seems to be a preference for German films that put audiences through a gruelling ordeal by being as cryptic and convoluted as possible.