While last year’s festival was seen as a classic, the 2012 hit list was a little less memorable
THERE WERE some notable surprises when the awards for the 65th Cannes Film Festival were announced last night. But, as most pundits anticipated, Michael Haneke’s Amour, a terrifyingly austere study of disease and decline, secured the Palme d’Or, the festival’s prize for best film. Audrey Tautou and Adrien Brody awarded the Palme to the Austrian director, who now becomes part of a select band of seven directors to have won on two occasions.
He also triumphed in 2009 for The White Ribbon. Amour, favourite since its unveiling last Sunday, stars veteran French actor Emmanuelle Riva as a woman dying traumatically following a stroke. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays her unflinchingly unsentimental husband.
The Camera d’Or for best first picture went to Benh Zeitlin for the magnificent Beasts of the Southern Wild. The weird, surreal film, a study of refugees from flooding in the southern United States, was well reviewed, but, having already won awards at the Sundance Festival, it was considered somewhat out of the Cannes loop.
There also some minor gasps when Ken Loach – the most nominated director for the Palme d’Or – picked up the Prix de Jury, the bronze medal, for The Angels’ Share. Though very enjoyable, the picture, a tale of certain Scottish larrikins’ efforts to steal a prized malt whiskey, is surely the lightest film in the English director’s canon.
Best script went to one of the main contenders, Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills. A study of madness and religion in contemporary Romania, Mungiu’s picture, unrelentingly bleak, could not be more different from Loach’s effort. Cosmina Stratan and Cristina Flutur, who play friends in a remote convent, shared the prize for best actress.
The best actor prize went to Mads Mikkelsen, a popular Danish actor, for his well-received turn as a teacher wrongly accused of sexual abuse in Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt.
The biggest shock of the evening was, perhaps, the award of best director to the Mexican film-maker Carlos Reygadas for Post Tenebras Lux. The deeply puzzling art film – featuring endlessly baffling diversions – received mostly poor reviews from the Cannes press pack.
It was almost as astonishing to find Matteo Garrone’s Reality, a slim tale of Italian reality television, picking up the Grand Prix, the festival’s second prize. There has been much discussion of the surprising information that Aniello Arena, the film’s star, had been in prison for murder during filming and had been released on a daily basis to shoot his scenes. Brows will be furrowed at the news that the Italian director Nanni Moretti, head of the jury, oversaw the awarding of this prestigious gong to a little-fancied film by a compatriot. Indeed, Reality was the only Italian film in the main competition.
The world’s critics reviewed this year’s programme with guarded enthusiasm. Whereas the 2011 Cannes was seen as a classic, the 65th festival achieved a modest – though not spectacular – hit-rate of memorable films. The organisers must certainly have been happy with the star power on display. Having selected an unusually high number of American-based pictures, they were able to welcome the likes of Robert Pattinson, Nicole Kidman, Brad Pitt and Zac Efron to the party. But Anglophone pictures in the main competition such as Lee Daniels’s The Paperboy and Walter Salles’s On the Road turned out to be disappointing.
In the event, the only English- language picture from the main competition to secure a major award – Beasts of the Southern Wild played in the Un Certain Regard sidebar – was Loach’s amusing The Angels’ Share. The home nation was also disappointed. Amour (as its title suggests) was made in the country and features a cast of French greats. But no French national got their hands on a gong. Two films from France had been expected to figure: Alain Resnais’s challenging You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet and Leos Carax’s positively deranged Holy Motors. Moretti and his jury will have won few friends among their hosts.
