CANNES, France — The satire “Triangle of Sadness,” from the Swedish director Ruben Ostlund, received the Palme d’Or at the seventy fifth Cannes Film Festival at a ceremony right here on Saturday. A blunt, ugly sendup of class politics, the film had sharply divided critics.
The awards ceremony ran a comparatively painless 90 or so minutes, one other reminder that the emphasis at Cannes stays on the films themselves, not the accompanying circus. Held contained in the magnificent Grand Lumière Theater contained in the pageant’s headquarters — with the nine-person jury watching from the stage — the awards confer vital legitimation and generate much-needed public relations for motion pictures that, years into the pandemic, are headed right into a still-difficult world for artwork cinema.
The Grand Prix — the pageant’s second prize — was break up between “Close,” from the Belgian director Lukas Dhont, and “Stars at Noon,” from the French auteur Claire Denis. “Stars at Noon” was brutalized by critics, however it wasn’t wholly a shock that it received an award: Vincent Lindon, the president of this yr’s jury, has appeared in a number of of Denis’s motion pictures. “Close,” a vital and viewers favourite about two 13-year-old boys whose friendship is tragically examined, drew heat applause from the Lumière viewers.
The Jury Prize, the third prize, was break up between two very completely different dramas: “EO,” a heartbreaker a couple of donkey from the Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski, and “The Eight Mountains,” a coming-of-age story from the Belgian filmmakers Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch. Skolimowski, 84, started his acceptance speech by thanking (and naming) all six of his donkeys — together with slightly magnificence known as Taco. For her half, Vandermeersch appeared to shock her co-director and companion by repeatedly kissing him proper earlier than he began his acceptance speech.
The South Korean director Park Chan-wook received the director prize for “Decision to Leave,” an entertainingly twisty thriller (which riffs on Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”), which was a vital favourite. “This is so cool,” Park mentioned in English on taking the stage, although he additionally added an expletive.
The screenplay award was given to the engrossing (and chatty) drama “Boy from Heaven,” from the Swedish director Tarik Saleh. The movie traces the political intrigues swirling round a younger Egyptian scholar, a Sunni Muslim, quickly after he begins learning at a strong spiritual college. After accepting his award, Saleh devoted his prize to younger Egyptian filmmakers: “Raise your voices, and tell your stories.”
In one of the larger surprises of the night, the perfect actress went to Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the star of the extensively disliked true-crime drama “Holy Spider,” from the Iranian-born director Ali Abbasi. She performs a journalist who faces the indifference and misogyny of the police as she tracks down a serial killer. The finest actor prize was given to Song Kang-ho, the sensible South Korean actor (“Parasite”), for his delicate, soulful efficiency as a child trafficker in “Broker,” the newest from the Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda.
A particular prize to commemorate the pageant’s seventy fifth anniversary was given to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who had been in competitors once more with “Tori and Lokita,” about two undocumented African immigrants in a merciless, profoundly inhospitable Belgium. The Dardennes are among the many most justly honored filmmakers within the historical past of Cannes, having received the Palme twice (for “Rosetta” in 1999 and “The Child” in 2005). This award was well-merited.
