Palme d’Or winner: Greta Gerwig’s jury plumps for crowd-pleaser over political picks
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Cannes this year opened with a promise from its long-serving director, Thierry Frémaux, that political controversy would not be on the programme – or at least would be confined to its cinema screens. And at tonight’s closing ceremony, the jury lived up to that pledge, awarding the Palme d’Or to the festival’s most nakedly crowd-pleasing film.
Many of us suspected the Palme would either go to The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a masterful domestic thriller from the Iranian dissident director Mohammad Rasoulof, or All We Imagine As Light, the first Indian film to be selected for the competition in 30 years.
Instead, though, it was presented to Anora – a riotously grubby screwball comedy directed by Sean Baker, in which a shrewd young stripper marries the feckless son of a Russian oligarch during a trip to Las Vegas, then weathers the mother-and-father of all bad days when his parents find out.
This was a startling choice by the jury, led by Barbie director Greta Gerwig, but also arguably the right one: Anora was by far the most fun I had at a Cannes screening this year. The film’s 25-year-old lead, Mikey Madison, is a star in the making – she was one of the young discoveries in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, alongside Austin Butler and Sydney Sweeney – and I’m told Anora’s US distributors, Neon, are already plotting a Best Actress Oscar push.
Anora’s victory makes it Neon’s fifth consecutive Cannes winner after Parasite, Titane, Triangle of Sadness and Anatomy of a Fall: an extraordinary and surely unmatched streak. At a party this year I heard the boutique distributor’s founder, Tim League, referred to as ‘the Palme Whisperer’; a nickname that won’t be disappearing any time soon.
All We Imagine as Light, a delicate Mumbai-set drama following the lives of three nurses, was presented with the Grand Prix – essentially, the festival’s silver medal, and an honour which instantly elevates its 38-year-old director, Payal Kapadia, onto world cinema’s must-watch list. Meanwhile, Rasoulof and his film – a masterful domestic thriller from Iran which doubles as an allegory for the nation’s political strife – were given a Prix Spécial.
Quoi? Well, this was a one-off addition to the standard suite of seven awards – perhaps because none of the remaining options, for acting, directing and so on, seemed quite substantial enough. Rasoulof was only able to attend Cannes in person after having fled Iran in secret a few weeks ago to escape an eight-year prison sentence for speaking out against the ruling state: Gerwig’s jury were right to make it worth the trip.
Leaks from the jury room over the last few days suggested strident minority support for Emilia Pérez, an outlandish musical thriller from France’s Jacques Audiard about a Mexican gang boss who evades capture by having a gender reassignment op. In the end, that manifested in two prizes: the Prix du Jury and Best Actress, which was split among the ensemble. The film isn’t among Audiard’s best, but it’s hard to imagine another filmmaker wading into this epically controversial subject with such fearlessness and verve.
All in all, it was the best kind of closing ceremony, with results that felt both surprising and just, and which made an irresistible argument for cinema as a unifying force.
