The complex moral drama “Fjord,” starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, has won the Palme d’Or for best film at the Cannes Film Fest making the Romanian writer-director the 10th filmmaker to win the coveted award twice– 19 years after his first victory for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in 2007.
The film, about a Romanian family of Evangelical Christians mired in a child abuse case when they run afoul of the Norwegian social system, deals with systemic order, individual disarray, social conformity and personal deviance.
It was among the hotly debated titles in the Competition, with critics split on its merits and significance.
This was Mungiu’s first feature to be set and shot entirely outside his home country. The director was modest in his acceptance speech: “All awards are contextual.mThe fact that you gave me this award, it’s wonderful for us and we feel very happy, but we need to wait 10, 20 years to watch these films again, and maybe then we’ll understand which of them were really good, and managed to survive the test of time.”
The win also represents a major coup for “Fjord’s” U.S. distributor Neon, which has now extended its Palme-winning streak to 7 years running, beginning with eventual Oscar winner Parasite in 2019, and will certainly buoy their Oscar awards hopes for Mungiu’s film.
In a European-dominated slate of winners, the Best Director prize was shared by two oppositely styled visions: Fatherland, Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s evocation of post-war Germany, and The Black Bal, Spanish duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s sprawling, era-spanning ode to queer lives and loves lost to fascism, written through the poetry of of Federico Garcia Lorca, who was mirdered in 1936.
The tie provided an amusing moment, due to the confused shuffle of the 3 directors on stage prompting Pawlikowski to quip, “This is a piece of disastrous mise-en-scène!” But it also offered two most stirring speeches, with the Spanish filmmakers, known locally as Los Javis, overcome with emotion as they honored their queer antecedents: “The only way we can honor the suffering, the silence, the death of the LGBTQ people that came before us, is making sure that the next generation has the same freedom or more.”
Pawlikowski then spoke precisely and passionately about the need for nuanced understanding of political cinema: “We live and breath politics, and cinema should reflect that, but not on terms dictated by politicians and activists: It takes courage to resist dictators and bullies, but it also takes courage to resist noise, algorithms, peer pressure.”
Los Javis weren’t the only duo honored on a night where collaborative artistry was especially celebrated. Both acting awards went to pairs of co-stars, with Frenchwoman Virginie Efira and Japanese star Tao Okamoto (the only non-European individual to take a prize, for culture-melding French-Japanese production) sharing the Best Actress award for their exquisitely calibrated, conversational dual turn in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, as a care home manager and experimental theater director who find deep and unexpected bond through their respective work.
German director Valeska Grisebach was the sole Jury Prize winner for her ambitiously experimental, documentary-influenced crime drama The Dreamed Adventure, but she called her leading lady Yana Radeva onto stage as her most invaluable collaborator.
Frenchman Emmanuel Marrevtook Best Screenplay for another of the Competition’s most unconventional works, the French Resistance drama A Man of His Time.
The Camera d’Or for best first feature across all sections of the festival went to Rwandan filmmaker Marie Clémentine Dusabejambo for her heartfelt debut Ben’Imana, a happy turnaround after the film was entirely blanked by the Un Certain Regard jury last night. It was a welcome triumph for African cinema on such a Eurocentric night.
In a year where American films were conspicious by their absence, The two U.S. Competition titles, James Gray’s Paper Tiger and Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love,” both low-budget indies, left empty-handed.
The awards reflected a major theme of this year’s festival, of film as a global, exploratory medium, with “Fjord,” “Minotaur,” “The Dreamed Adventure,” “Fatherland” and “All of a Sudden” all either addressed themes of displacement on screen, or made by filmmakers working in new countries and with various national cinemas.
Queer Cinema is Alive and Well
LGBTQ+ cinema ruled Cannes this year: The biggest and hottest movies of the festival focused on queer characters, themes, or perspectives.
In competition, Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love, starring Rami Malek as a gay performance artist navigating the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York, received a lengthy ovation and chatter about an awards run for the Oscar-winning Bohemian Rhapsody star.
Lukas Dhont, the Belgian filmmaker behind the award winning Girl and Close, wowed most critics with Coward, his WWI drama about queer love in the foxholes.
Then there were the Javis — Spanish directing duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi — whose La Bola Negra wove together three generations of queer men across the Spanish Civil War and beyond, which received the festival’s longest standing ovation (20 minutes) and overwhelming critical praise.
Outside competition, Jane Schoenbrun’s queer slasher Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opened Un Certain Regard and Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid, a comedy that feels like an Adam Sandler movie with drugs and dolls, was the festival’s hottest ticket.
