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Cannes Final Report, May 27th
BY JOHN HARKNESS
CANNES - The jury took the easy way out. They gave the Palme d'Or to a movie about the Holocaust - a very
well-made but pedestrian movie about the Holocaust at that. As
Heidegger said, repetition destroys meaning, and the one feeling I
had during Roman Polanski's The Pianist was "been
there, done that" - and not just once but a few dozen times. There
are, I'm sure, still great films to be made about the Holocaust, but
Polanski's isn't one of them.
In a singularly strange awards show that featured Michael
Moore's attempt to make part of his speech in French (if he spoke
like that on the street he'd be arrested), a really, really long
speech by Korean director Kwon-taek Im in Korean that was then
translated into French, and numerous references to Bush 2.0 landing
in Paris, the jury made a series of honourable choices in the main
categories - Aki Kaurismäki's The Man Without A Past
for the Grand Prix, Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention
for the Jury Prize, and a special 55th-anniversary prize for Moore's
Bowling For Columbine - and a series of individual choices
that went over the edge into just plain bizarre.
Whoever gave the jury its marching orders, whether it was festival
president Gilles Jacob or programming chief Thierry
Fremaux (I suspect Jacob - Fremaux is the Mr. Smithers of
Cannes), must have told the jury to spread out the prizes, but that
doesn't account for the acting prizes.
Choosing Kati Outinen, in roughly the same performance she's
given in every Kaurismäki film since The Match Factory Girl, over
Miranda Richardson's triple turn in David Cronenberg's
Spider is strange enough, but picking The Son's
Olivier Gourmet over an acting field that included first-rate
work by Jack Nicholson, Ralph Fiennes and Daniel
Auteuil at the top of their respective games is just plain weird.
It may be the first time in Cannes history that the jury has honoured
the back of someone's neck.
Heck, if you're going to go weird (which we might have expected from
a jury led by David Lynch), go all the way and give the Palme
to something everyone hated.
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