Social issues win at Cannes

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, May 21, 2005

CANNES, France – The 58th Festival de Cannes struck a mighty blow for socially conscious yet highly dramatic cinema Saturday when it awarded the Palme d’Or to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s quietly devastating “The Child.” It was the second Palme for the Belgian filmmaking brothers, who won the top prize here in 1999 for “Rosetta.”

“The Child” features Jeremie Renier as an amoral young grifter who gets into a horrible mess when he becomes a father. Like all the Dardennes’ films, including 1996’s “La Promesse,” which also starred Renier, it’s a slice of underclass reality that relentlessly shows how difficult it can be to have ordinary human feelings in impoverished circumstances.

This year’s festival was especially good for American filmmakers, starting with actor-director Tommy Lee Jones, whose first theatrical feature, “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” took two prizes during the ceremony at the Grand Palais. These included best actor for Jones and best screenplay for Mexico’s Guillermo Arriaga, who, as he accepted the award, said he was wearing “the first tuxedo I have on in my life.”

Jones plays a ranch foreman in West Texas who goes to extraordinary lengths to see that his slain best friend, an illegal immigrant, gets a proper burial in Mexico. Jones, whose film was shown on Friday, gave special thanks to “the warmhearted people of France who came to the film. … They made me feel as good as I’ve ever felt in my life.”

Taking the Grand Jury prize, considered the festival’s runner-up award, was Jim Jarmusch’s “Broken Flowers,” which stars a nearly catatonic Bill Murray as an aging Lothario who hears he might have a child and goes on a zombielike search to find out who the mother might be.

Although her film was not in competition, Cannes was also good to American independent director Miranda July. Her quirky Sundance Film Festival favorite “Me and You and Everyone We Know” shared the Camera d’Or for best first film, along with the Sri Lankan “The Forsaken Land,” directed by Vimukthi Jayasundara, and also took the Grand Prize for the Critics’ Week section.

The Cinefondation prize for a film school film went to another American, New York University’s Antonio Campos, for “Buy It Now.”

As usual, films that found favor with critics did not necessarily do well with the main Cannes jury, which included directors Emir Kusturica and Agnes Varda, writer Toni Morrison and actress Salma Hayek, a panel that Jarmusch aptly characterized in his acceptance speech as “very strange.”

David Cronenberg’s exceptional “A History of Violence” was shut out, and writer-director Michael Haneke, an Austrian who makes films in French, had to be satisfied with best director for his well-received “Hidden.”

“Hidden,” which also won the international critics award and the Ecumenical Jury award, details a modern nightmare: a French talk show host (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife (Juliette Binoche) receive a series of anonymous videos showing that someone secretly has been recording their world. The most accessible film yet from a director with a normally icy worldview, “Hidden” deals with questions of revenge, recrimination and personal and societal responsibility.

In other prize news, Israeli Hanna Laslo’s strong performance in Amos Gitai’s didactic “Free Zone” took the best actress award, and Wang Xiaoshuai’s “Shanghai Dreams,” a genteel look at an explosive period in Chinese history, won the Jury Prize.

The Un Certain Regard section was won by Romania’s Cristi Puiu for “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” and the unofficial Palm Dog for the best canine performance was given in its fifth year to an Asiatic mutt glimpsed in a new feature from Mongolia shown in the Cannes film market.

Not all the movies screened at Cannes are eligible for awards. One of the most intriguing was “Factotum,” starring Matt Dillon and set in Los Angeles, and directed by Norway’s Bent Hamer. It gracefully combines the droll sensibility of “Kitchen Stories,” Hamer’s last film, with the bleak world of despairing poet Charles Bukowski, on whose writings the film is based.

The most talked about noncompetition film, for Americans at least, was Woody Allen’s London-based “Match Point,” a departure not only in setting but in subject matter. A thriller starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as a ruthless social climber and Scarlett Johansson as a young American he becomes involved with, “Match Point” displayed more energy than any Allen film in years. Whether this was enough to make the film a complete success remains an open question.

Associated Press

Spanish actress Penelope Cruz listens as Tommy Lee Jones accepts the best actor prize for his role in “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” on Saturday at the Cannes film festival.