Cannes Awards – A Gleeful Invasion

Class act
A gleeful invasion of the Palais Lumière stage by twenty or so young teenage school kids concluded last night’s Cannes awards ceremony. No, it wasn’t another colourful French exercise in the art of social protest, but the result of the Sean Penn-presided jury’s unanimous decision to award the coveted Palme d’Or to Laurent Cantet for Entre les murs (The Class).

Robert de Niro handed over the gold amid the merriest of mayhem that reflected a party version of the film itself. It’s a docudrama shot entirely in a school, over a year and principally in one classroom, in Paris’ 20th arrondissement. A multi-ethnic band of spirited French kids – not dissimilar in origin to the black-blanc-beur profile of the French team that won the World Cup in 1998 – come to terms with authority and the purpose of their education. It’s very French, very universal.

The film is based on the prize-winning autobiographical novel, Entre les murs, by François Bégaudeau, who also appears in the film. He plays a version of himself, a charismatically philosophical teacher, François, whose approach to the challenges of his task as a teacher is the pivot of the 128-minute film. Between the good kids and the troublemakers, all listed in the credits as playing characters with their own names, such as Nassim, Laura, Wei, Damien, Eva, Baboucar and Koumba, it’s a fiesta of education theory in practice.

Still from Entre les murs

French hat trick
So it’s a great year so far for French cinema as Culture Minister, Christine Albanel underlined. A hat trick of successes, beginning with Marion Cotillard winning the female acting Oscar® and healthy box-office and critical acclaim for her French language role as Edith Piaf in La Môme (La vie en rose) and followed by a popular comedy Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, released in February, which has already broken all-time French box-office records selling well in excess of 20 million tickets.

And now this – the first French film to win the Palme in over 20 years! Un, deux, trois and it’s only May.

Transparency and cigarettes
An excellent feature of the Cannes Jury for the past few years has been the post-awards press conference where the jury members come and talk about their choices with the attending journos. There are some video extracts on the Cannes site and it’s worth a visit just to watch them sitting there, sipping on Perrier and sucking on cigs, with Sean coherently stuttering why they did what they did, alongside the magnificently enigmatic French actress, Jeanne Balibar.

Irish light
Irish cinema shone in its own sweet way too. In Cannes there are several invited selections, the Competition, its sidebar Un Certain Regard, as well as the unofficial Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (Directors Fortnight) and La Semaine de la Critique (Critic’s Week), amounting to about 80 films in total. Each year there is a special prize, the Caméra d’Or, selected and awarded by a separate Jury for the best first film included in any of these sections. This year there were more than twenty first films all told and the big prize went to Steve McQueen [picture above left], the British director who made the Bobby Sands story, Hunger. The prize was announced by the Caméra d’Or jury president, cutting-edge French cineaste Bruno Dumont (a previous winner for La Vie de Jésus and twice Grand Prix du Jury winner for L’Humanité and for Flandres), and handed over by Dennis Hopper, a hero of McQueen’s for his capacity to take risks.

Funders at Film 4, NIFC and BCI must have also smiled in satisfaction at their own risk taking.



Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands in Hunger

Art from poison
It was also a great year for Italian cinema in Cannes, with Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo picking up the Jury prize for his burlesquely comical journey into the dark unfathomable heart of Giulio Andreotti, the man who has been Italy’s nefarious political master puppeteer for the past fifty years.

The Grand Prix or second prize went to the searing indictment that is Gomorra, Matteo Garrone’s adaptation of Italian bestseller by Roberto Saviano. It deals with the inextricable tentacular grip that the Neapolitan Camorra has on that region, from the slightest of individuals to the greatest of state crime corruption involving toxic waste disposal. One unlikely redemptive moment occurs when, like a butterfly fleeing a cesspit, one man feels the freedom to say no. But this only serves to underline the impossibility of resolving the problem.

Both films, with great talent, deal courageously with the poisonously corrupt underbelly of Italian society.

Latino thesps rule
The best actress prize went to Sandra Corveloni, a 46-year-old first-timer from Brazil. She plays a pregnant house cleaner who already has four teenage boys to handle in down-at-heel Sao Paulo in Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’s Linha de Passe. The youngest boy has a strange fascination with bus drivers, another is trying desperately to become a professional footballer before he’s too old, another is a courier and dead-beat dad looking at criminal solutions to his survival problems, while another is a born-again Christian as an avenue to escape the same fate. In social terms it is not dissimilar to Gomorra, though it is somewhat more schematic in its construction. Nevertheless, the resulting composite profile excellently captures the essence of daily strife in Sao Paolo.

It takes a big charismatic man to satisfactorily occupy a screen for four and a half hours. That’s why Benicio Del Toro got best actor for his portrayal of Che in Steven Soderbergh’s two-part work-in-progress opus on the legendary T-shirt and poster guy. In spite of the film’s length, much telling fact about the myth is left unexplored. However, some mood and atmosphere, alongside the compelling thesping, goes some way to compensate the expository bio-gaps.

Brothers in harms
To top off the top prizes, the genial Belgian brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, twice Golden Palmed already for Rosetta and L’enfant, picked up the best script award for their excellent Le silence de Lorna, which was slightly more narrative bound than usual. An Albanian girl marries a Belgian junkie for papers. Her handlers prepare to kill him so she can cash in by marrying a Russian for the same purpose. More plot twists than classic Dardenne fare, but the essential qualities remain. The possible conclusions to classic story actually happen halfway through the film, leaving us with a delectable sense of anticipation.

Another Cannes Competition regular is brilliantly gloomy Turkish director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. After Uzak (Jury Prize 2002) and Climates he returned this year with Three Monkeys and picked up the Best Director award. His films have a similar intensity to the Dardennes, though with the speed button on slo-mo end of the tempo scale. Like them his narrative structure is set categorically to spare and simple. The third similarity is that his offering this year, just like theirs, is narratively enriched with at least double the average number of plot twists. A hustling politician kills someone in a late night countryside hit-and-run accident. He pays his usual driver to take the rap and do the time in jail. The story clips along, though the pace is intriguingly ponderous, as wife and son also take determining roles. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

See Cannes official website here