During the awards ceremony at this year's Cannes Film Festival, which wrapped up on Sunday, Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan went into a weird, tearless crying jag while accepting the Grand Prix (second prize, despite a name that sounds like first prize) for his latest film, It's Only the End of the World. The live feed then cut to a shot of juror Mads Mikkelsen, sporting an expression roughly midway between baffled and concerned. Those of us who attended Cannes this year quickly adopted Mikkelsen's look for memes and Twitter avatars, as it nicely encapsulated our reaction to the jury's choices in general. The festival assembled arguably its best lineup in years, yet most of the finest achievements were completely ignored.
Not that the jury's choices were completely without interest. (Deliberating alongside Mads were Kirsten Dunst, Donald Sutherland and Mad Max franchise director George Miller, among others.) Unexpectedly, they awarded Cannes' top prize, the Palme d'Or, to I, Daniel Blake, an alternately compassionate and righteously angry portrait of ordinary Brits struggling to navigate England's deliberately maddening welfare system. Like many of director Ken Loach's films, it's far too didactic to achieve real greatness, but it does feature a superlative performance by stand-up comic Dave Johns in the title role—his weary exasperation makes the preachiness palatable. Also worthwhile, though somewhat exhausting at just shy of three hours, is Jury Prize winner American Honey, from another British filmmaker, Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank). Based on the improbable adventures of American kids who travel the country selling magazine subscriptions (no, this is not a period piece), the film is like an endless party on wheels; Arnold tosses Shia LaBeouf into an ensemble cast of unknowns she discovered while taking road trips across the U.S., and the collective energy they produce is infectious. Only the jury, however, liked Dolan's movie, in which some superb French actors (Marion Cotillard, Vincent Cassel, Léa Seydoux) scream at each other in unflattering close-ups for 97 minutes straight. It's around half the length of American Honey, yet feels over twice as long.
Meanwhile, the real triumphs of Cannes 2016 went home empty-handed, though they're certain to be widely seen and discussed (by the standards of independent and foreign films, anyway) when they're eventually released here in the States. Jim Jarmusch, whose Stranger Than Paradise won the Camera d'Or (for best first film) way back in 1984, returned for the umpteenth time with a lovely existential doodle called Paterson, starring Adam "Kylo Ren" Driver as a New Jersey bus driver who secretly moonlights as a poet. Eschewing narrative in favor of simply observing the protagonist's routine over the course of a week, and the ways in which what he sees informs his art, the film is decidedly not for everyone (and clearly wasn't to the Cannes jury's taste), but those in tune with its quiet rhythm will be enthralled. Even better, and much more of a crowd-pleaser—maybe too much of one to win any prizes—is Toni Erdmann, the third feature from German director Maren Ade (whose little-seen Everyone Else was the best film of 2010). The story of a middle-aged prankster who adopts a goofy alter ego and invades the professional life of his tightly wound adult daughter, it features two high-wire comic set pieces that had the normally staid international press wildly applauding and cheering mid-film—almost unheard of at Cannes. Saying any more would spoil the fun; this is the kind of riotous shape-shifter you want to experience tabula rasa.
Other films that premiered on the Croisette this year, and will likely make at least a minor splash down the road, include Loving, starring Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as the couple at the heart of the U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized interracial marriage in 1967; Personal Shopper, an oddity in which Kristen Stewart spends a lot of screen time apparently texting back and forth with a ghost; The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook's sumptuous, depraved adaptation of Sarah Waters' Victorian-set novel Fingersmith (now set in 1930s Korea); and Elle, the first proper feature in a decade from the always scandalous Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Starship Troopers), with Isabelle Huppert as a rape victim whose response is, shall we say, unconventional.
Sean Penn's abysmal The Last Face, however, was greeted with such unanimous scorn that it may never see the light of a screen again. Set in war-torn Liberia and Sierra Leone, this tone-deaf atrocity treats the deaths of countless faceless Africans as the backdrop for a drippy romance between a field doctor (Javier Bardem) and an activist (Charlize Theron). It's hard to believe that Penn, a sincere humanitarian, couldn’t see that his movie trivializes everything he cares about, since it was painfully obvious to everyone else. On that, if little else, the critics and the jury were apparently in total agreement.
