And so adieu
5/21/2005 3:14:16 PM
Nobody wants to hear film critics bitch about how wiped out they feel at the end of a festival. Nor should they -- however grueling the experience (and trust me, it's not easy maintaining your concentration during four movies a day for two weeks straight), it definitely beats the hell out of actually working. So apart from that parenthetical dash of self-pity, I'll spare you the spiel. Just understand that there's a reason this final entry is so much shorter and more declarative than all the others.
In an unexpected spasm of good taste, the jury, led this year by director Emir Kusturica (Underground), awarded the Palme d'Or to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Child, the best Competition film I saw here this year. Despite the movie's obvious excellence, this result came as something of a shock, since the Dardennes won the grand prize just six years and two films ago for Rosetta. Here in the press office, from which I watched the ceremony on television (my other option was to sit in the huge Debussy Theatre and watch it televised on that screen), the announcement was met with considerable applause. If nothing else, this greatly increases the likelihood that The Child will eventually turn up at a theater reasonably near you.
With a couple of notable exceptions, the other awards went more or less as expected. Jim Jarmusch's well-liked Broken Flowers got the Grand Jury Prize (second place), while the other consensus favorite, Michael Haneke's Hidden, had to settle for Best Director (and a juicy distribution deal). A smaller Jury Prize, which I tend to think of as Honorable Mention, went to the earnest but rather tepid period Chinese melodrama Shanghai Dreams, which had been completely buzz-free. The jury agreed with me about Hanna Laslo's fine work in Free Zone, but also took a left-field liking to Tommy Lee Jones' weirdly sadistic The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, citing Jones himself as Best Actor, in honor of his numerous variations on "ornery," and giving the Screenplay award to Guillermo Arriaga, who indulges the same arbitrary achronology that sunk his script for 21 Grams. And Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know) added the Camera d'Or (best first film) to the mountain of accolades she's received since premiering her movie at Sundance.
Me, I saw a number of good movies (though no great ones -- at least on first viewing); hung out with colleagues I see only three times a year; developed an addiction to the croque monsieur that I suspect I'll find difficult to satisfy at home; bought an electrical adaptor at FNAC that appears to have been deliberately constructed so as to frustrate iPod users; permanently alienated an ex-girlfriend for what I believe is the third and most likely final time; and abjectly failed, mostly from lack of (ahem) Hooksexup, to catch so much as a fleeting glimpse of Ms. Sylvie Testud.
Which just gives me one more reason to come back next year.
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