12 Times the Palme d’Or Was Awarded to the Wrong Film

Right here was the 12 months trifling novelty triumphed over historic humanist imaginative and prescient. That’s to not say Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle’s documentary is with out appeal. The movie’s vivid underwater cinematography was an otherworldly, Avatar-like revelation in its day, serving to Cousteau and Malle grow to be the primary doc administrators in Cannes historical past to take dwelling the highest prize. Right now, their colourful crowd-pleaser is usually solely remembered as an inspiration for Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Ray’s Pather Panchali, in the meantime, is extensively hailed as a landmark — the film that launched the world to one in every of cinema’s nice humanists. Conspicuously, Cannes’ 1956 jury was majority-French (seven out of 12 members, together with jury chair Maurice Lehmann), suggesting some native bias was at play. The jury was nonetheless conscious it had seen one thing important in Ray’s masterwork. For the primary and solely time in Cannes historical past, the pageant created a “Finest Human Doc” prize to honor Pather Panchali. The token honor undoubtedly helped put Indian neorealism on the map, however most of the sentiments that contributed to Silent World‘s elevation over Ray’s masterpiece have aged horrendously. (“I don’t wish to see a movie of peasants consuming with their palms,” François Truffaut was alleged to have stated on the time.)

This isn’t to knock Pleasant Persuasion. William Wyler’s Western, starring Gary Cooper as a Quaker whose finds his pacifist beliefs challenged with the onset of the American Civil Conflict, is an amicable, completely watchable, slice of Golden Age Hollywood leisure. However the competitors line up for the tenth Cannes pageant featured no less than three real cinematic classics: Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Federico Fellini’s Nights Of Cabiria and Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped and a pair of excellent European dramas in Jules Dassin’s He Who Should Die, and Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal. Even when the jury, beneath French author André Maurois, needed a Hollywood film, that they had a a lot better one obtainable within the type of Fred Astaire-Audrey Hepburn automobile Humorous Face. Maybe Maurois was utilizing the prize as a technique to honor Michael Wilson, the blacklisted screenwriter who had his identify stripped off Pleasant Persuasion after he refused to call names. Honorable, maybe, however nonetheless a awful alternative. The Seventh Seal is an indelible a part of the world cinema cannon. Pleasant Persuasion is a solution in a pub quiz.

On the time, Marcel Camus’ retelling of the basic tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice, staged as a musical throughout Carnaval in Fifties Rio de Janeiro, that includes an all-Afro-Brazilian forged, most likely felt revolutionary. How else to clarify why this forgotten footnote of a movie snatched the Palme away from a pair of now-iconic French classics: Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour? The Cannes jury wasn’t the one one swept up. Black Orpheus went on to win the Oscar for finest overseas movie. However sharp-eyed critic Jean-Luc Godard obtained it proper in his Cannes assessment. “What offends me about this adventurer’s movie is that it accommodates no journey, or this poet’s movie, that it accommodates no poetry.” Even in 1959, Camus’ depiction of Rio’s lush seashores and sensual, colourful favelas appears like unique Euro-tourism and postcard romance.

Keeper of Guarantees (O Pagador de Promessas), an at-times poignant drama about religion and social injustice, is the one Brazilian movie ever to win the Palme d’Or. It’s additionally a painfully mediocre film that’s little or no seen in the present day. It pales in opposition to no less than two of the opposite contenders at Cannes in 1962, each of which at the moment are stone-cold classics of European artwork cinema: Agnes Varda’s New Wave delight Cléo from 5 to 7 and Michelangelo Antonioni’s modernist meditation on alienation, L’Eclisse. And there was extra: Pietro Germi’s Divorce, Italian Fashion, Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc and Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. What a 12 months! Reportedly, the jury’s determination was stunning in 1962 — it has grown outrageous with time.

The Mission is a fairly sturdy (if turgid) interval epic, starring Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons close to the height of their powers. It additionally options lush cinematography from Chris Menges and a hovering Ennio Morricone rating. However is it the ultimate masterpiece of one in every of cinema historical past’s final auteurs? No, it actually is just not. A jury led by studio mainstay Sydney Pollack (recent off Oscars success with Out of Africa) shocked the pageant by handing the Palme to “simply the type of lumbering white elephant” one would anticipate from the Oscars reasonably than Cannes, as Time critic Richard Corliss put it. Andre Tarkovsky’s swan tune, in the meantime, a piece of haunting imagery and profound non secular depth, was the clear emotional favourite on the pageant, no much less so because the exiled Soviet grasp was mendacity dying of most cancers in a Paris hospital on the time. Giving voice to the outrage of cinephiles all alongside the Croisette, French producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier reportedly stormed as much as juror Philip French within the foyer of the Palais after the Palme ceremony to exclaim, “You’re a member of the jury, non? You may have disgraced yourselves. This can be remembered as an evening of disgrace.”

The 1987 awards ceremony is the stuff of Cannes legend, emblematic of the pageant’s excessive drama and combative important spirit. The Palme that 12 months — on the pageant’s fortieth anniversary — went to French filmmaker Maurice Pialat’s Beneath the Solar of Devil, an austere spiritual drama a couple of tormented nation priest — starring Gérard Depardieu, France’s greatest star on the time. Pialat is rightly thought of a significant determine and the movie has its admirers, then and now, however the competitors’s clear frontrunner was Wim Wenders’ lyrical fantasy Wings of Need, now an icon of world indie cinema. Pialat had lengthy been an enfant horrible of the French movie world (ceaselessly clashing with critics), and a few speculated the jury — practically half of which was French — felt he was overdue for main recognition, lending a semi-“lifetime achievement” aura to his shock win. The response to Beneath the Solar of Devil’s victory was nonetheless traditionally hostile. In the course of the ceremony contained in the Palais, the viewers erupted in boos and whistles of disapproval as French actor Yves Montand introduced Pialat’s movie because the Palme d’Or winner. Taking the stage, Pialat raised his fist and shouted again on the crowd: “I’m comfortable tonight for all of the whistles and shouts directed at me — and in case you don’t like me, I don’t such as you both!” Bonus factors for punk rock spirit, then — however Wings of Need has proved the much more enduring movie in each affect and affection. 

One other key chapter of Cannes lore. Intercourse, Lies, and Videotape, the low-budget debut of a 26-year-old Steven Soderbergh was a sensation on the 1989 pageant — a particular new voice that signaled the beginning of the Nineties American impartial movie wave. There was only one drawback: Spike Lee’s Do the Proper Factor premiered that very same 12 months. Roger Ebert would later write: “I’ve been given just a few filmgoing experiences in my life to equal the primary time I noticed Do the Proper Factor. Most films stay up there on the display screen. Only some penetrate your soul. In Could of 1989, I walked out of the screening on the Cannes Movie Pageant with tears in my eyes.” And but, Soderbergh went dwelling with the Palme and Lee left utterly empty-handed (Ebert’s spouse, Chaz, later said that her husband had been so appalled by the pageant’s full snubbing of Lee that he privately mentioned boycotting future editions of Cannes). Lee wasn’t discrete about the truth that he felt robbed. Talking of the Cannes jury chief that 12 months, he instructed reporters: “Wim Wenders had higher be careful ’trigger I’m ready for his ass. Someplace deep in my closet, I’ve a Louisville Slugger with Wenders’ identify on it.” Finally, the 2 auteurs would come to joke concerning the incident. Intercourse, Lies, and Videotape stays nicely regarded. Lee’s examination of racial stress in Brooklyn on the most popular day of the 12 months? It’s a full-fledged cultural watershed. 

The 90s featured a number of incidents of momentary madness, from the embrace of parachute pants and scrunchies to giving the 1992 Palme d’Or to Bille August’s The Finest Intentions. Whereas the previous are again in trend, the latter could by no means make sense. The Danish director, already a Palme winner for his serviceable 1988 interval piece Pelle The Conqueror, right here serves up a reheated dish of Ingmar Bergman fan fiction, working from a Bergman-penned script however delivering a tedious Scandi melodrama about clergymen and annoyed housewives residing a life fairly strange in rural Uppsala. By selecting August over Robert Altman’s The Participant, the jury, maybe unsurprisingly, given it was led by Gérard Depardieu, confirmed it might reasonably award a foul copy of the form of movie folks used to love than the only finest satire of Tinseltown ever made.

Right here we’ve got a howler for the ages. Moretti’s movie is arguably wonderful. An emotionally efficient drama a couple of household dealing with the sudden dying of a son, it’s actually higher than the Italian director’s soggy, latest Cannes choices. However it’s a humiliation to even ask: Is The Son’s Room higher cinema than David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or Michael Haneke’s The Piano Trainer, each in competitors that 12 months? In remarks on the awards ceremony, jury chief Liv Ullmann hinted at a fraught choice course of, saying Moretti’s film “touched our hearts” however that the jury’s deliberations concerned a lot “ardour and even anger.” The one cheap rationalization is that The Son’s Room emerged because the secure middle-ground alternative between impassioned champions of the 2 aesthetically radical masterpieces. 

Taking pot pictures at American tradition is an efficient technique if you wish to win in Cannes but it surely was a real shocker when the jury handed the Palme to Gus Van Sant’s slacker faculty shooter drama. The movie had its followers, however most critics eviscerated the low-budget effort, initially made for HBO, and loosely impressed by the Columbine faculty bloodbath, for its refusal to offer any perception into such random acts of violence. If the jury actually needed to point out its anti-American credentials, it have a a lot better deconstruction of the narrative lies on the coronary heart of the U. S. of A. in Lars von Trier’s Dogville. “Von Trier has judged America, discovered it wanting and subsequently deserving of rapid annihilation,” learn one (disapproving) assessment on the time. Can anybody watching the information in the present day argue that Lars doesn’t, maybe, have a degree?

At the very least two classes could be drawn from this version’s baffling final result: Nodding to political exigencies of the second seldom yields sound aesthetic judgment, and so started Cannes’ lengthy, continued snubbing of Korean auteur Park Chan-wook. The 12 months was 2004, George W. Bush was working for re-election and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and its fallout have been dominating world discourse. Fahrenheit 9/11 was a visceral and satisfying watch in case you loathed the sitting president and his catastrophic war-mongering, as a lot of the worldwide trade assembled in Cannes certainly did (the movie acquired a 20-minute standing ovation, one of many longest in pageant historical past). Even the jury’s arch-aesthetes like Quentin Tarantino, that 12 months’s chair, and Tilda Swinton, bowed to the second. Each later insisted they backed Moore’s doc for filmmaking causes reasonably than political ones. Positive… However so what was the true cinematic discovery of the day? That 12 months Cannes made a uncommon exception in permitting a younger Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy to compete within the pageant’s predominant competitors despite the fact that it had already been commercially launched months prior in South Korea. It’s simple to see why. Moore’s film, so galvanizing and potent within the second, has proved totally disposable, whereas Park’s revenge thriller is every little thing you possibly can hope for in a searing cult basic. Filled with iconic moments and weirdly resonant imagery (Choi Min Suk’s deranged coiffure; the relentless, claw-hammer battle scene; octopi eaten stay), the movie additionally introduced the artistic drive of the approaching Korean wave. Park has now introduced three immaculate masterpieces to Cannes — Oldboy, The Handmaiden (2016) and Choice to Go away (2022) — however has but to bag a Palme. No shock, then, that world cinema’s closest inheritor to Hitchcock is taking his subsequent characteristic, the black comedy thriller No Different Selection, to Venice this 12 months as a substitute.

Ruben Östlund could go down in Cannes historical past as his era’s Bille August, a Scandinavian director whose faddish movies gained over Cannes juries (twice!) however whose oeuvre has not aged nicely. Simply 5 years after taking his first Palme with The Sq., Östlund was again with one more heavy-handed, but oddly toothless, satire on capitalism and privilege, involving a yacht stuffed with 1 percenters who get caught on a desert island with the assistance, whom they then should depend on to outlive. One jaw-dropping set piece — that yacht puking scene — can’t make up for Triangle‘s lengthy stretches of strident smugness and humdrum humor. Jury prez Vincent Lindon may have picked Park Chan-wook’s movie noir masterpiece Choice to Go away — a movie whose fame is assured to solely develop with time — however as a substitute picked a comedy that wasn’t humorous with a political message so sophomore it makes The Sq. appear like Dr. Strangelove.