Cannes. Awards.

And the Palme d'Or goes to Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. The panel discussing the winners on arte at the moment, which includes Richard Peña of the New York Film Festival, is unanimously pleased.

The Grand Jury Prize: Naomi Kawase's The Mourning Forest (Mogari No Mori). More on that one soon.

The Jury Prize? It's a tie: Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light.

Best Director goes to Julian Schnabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Best Actor: Konstantin Lavronenko for his performance in Andreï Zyvagintsev's The Banishment.

Best Actress: Jeon Do-yeon for her performance in Lee Chang-dong's Secret Sunshine.

Best Screenplay: Fatih Akin for The Edge of Heaven.

A special "60th Festival" award goes to Gus Van Sant for Paranoid Park.

The Camera d'Or, presented to the best feature debut, goes to Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen's Meduzot (Jellyfish). Special mention: Anton Corbijn's Control.

The Palme d'Or for Best Short Film goes to Elisa Miller's Ver Llover (Watching It Rain).

Gilles Jacob, presenting a special career achievement Palme d'Or - only the fourth in the festival's history - to Jane Fonda: "I would never have imagined that the Cannes Festival would honor an FBI suspect, one who has at least 20,000 pages in her file. You are a fighter and a winner."

Cannes has also gathered all other non-Competition awards on one handy page.

Updates: Which is to say, reactions, commentary and the like; there are no more awards, of course. At any rate, Matt Dentler lists his favorites, a top 9, in order, with Diving Bell at #1.

Dave Kehr comments on what's most and what's least surprising about this year's round of awards.

At ScreenGrab, Mike D'Angelo drew up a list of what "Should win" and what "Could win" with less than an hour to go before the ceremony. Brave! Not much of that list pans out, but it's not at all an uninteresting read.

Online listening tip. Facets Executive Director Milos Stehlik looks back on the festival.

Updates, 5/28: Cannes presents notes from the press conference with the jury following the awards ceremony, opening with Orhan Pamuk's comments on 4 Months.... Two other notes warrant special mention. Sarah Polley: "I feel that I lived more in the past ten or eleven days than I have in my whole life." And Toni Collette on the "60th Anniversary" award: "We wanted to give the prize to someone whose film we admired in this particular Festival but whose body of work was also incredible and we were all in agreement about Gus."

"[I]t was almost as if Cannes, to mark its 60th anniversary, had willed the community of international filmmakers to bring forth some of their finest work," write Manohla Dargis and AO Scott in the New York Times. "It was especially gratifying that so much of that work came from directors in the early or middle stages of their careers, a shift from this festival's frequent reliance on an aging old guard.... Mr Mungiu, the newest Palme d'Or winner, was born in 1968 and has directed only two previous films. At his moment of glory, he struck a note of unforced modesty. 'One year ago we didn't have any idea about this project, and six months ago we didn't have any money,' he said, looking a bit stunned. 'I hope this award will be good news for small filmmakers from small countries.'" Also, a podcast.

"It's true what Todd McCarthy says in his Variety report on the Cannes awards: that the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days led the critics' polls throughout the fest," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "And he is also right when he implies that as such, it was kind of a surprise to see it take the Palme d'Or at the festival.... If my colleagues have found a theme at Cannes, it is that, despite some of the less-than-sanguine perspectives on film and its future offered by the Chacun son Cinema shorts commissioned for the 60th anniversary of the fest, both world cinema and the festival showed a new strength and diversity this year. That if the artistic film is the patient and Cannes is the hospital, the patient is showing new signs of life and the hospital is providing first-rate care."

"Decisions like these make Cannes look, in the best possible way, like a heavily besieged protectionist city state, stubbornly holding out for world cinema against the mighty forces of Hollywood-globalisation," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "But the big disappointment was that no gongs of any shape or size were handed to the Coens - especially exasperating, given that Gus Van Sant won an award for his disappointing slacker movie Paranoid Park... When the Coens' No Country For Old Men is released here in the UK, I'm confident that it will be regarded as one of their best films. It's weird that Cannes, which has so greatly sponsored the Coens' reputation over the years, should be so obtuse as to pass over such an excellent film."

Kenneth Turan has an overview in the Los Angeles Times.

"If somebody in Romania does a remake of Footloose will it be at Cannes in 2008?" asks Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "That's facetious, of course; the whole point of this new Romanian cinema, or whatever we should call it, is that it bears zero relationship to Hollywood filmmaking or the business model of the American entertainment megaliths." And a very fine wrap-up follows.

"How did [Julian Schnabel] embarrass himself and the Americans watching?" ask Time's Richard and Mary Corliss. "Let us count the ways: 1) lumbered across the wide stage to shake the hands of all 10 Jury members; 2) mispronounced the name of his lead actor (Mathieu Amalric) and the biggest international star in the cast (Max Von Sydow); 3) invoked the pseudo-French song 'Thank Heaven for Little Girls' (from the Hollywood musical Gigi) to acknowledge the film's five lovely supporting actresses, none of them little girls; 4) insulted his host country, then tried to turn it into a compliment ('Many times they say, "The Problem with France is the French," but that's a lie'); and 5) squeezed some sour grapes by saying, 'If I did get the Palme d'Or I was gonna give it to Bernardo Bertolucci, who's been ill. But I didn't, so it doesn't matter.' One or two jury members wince at the oafish display, as if to ask, Is it too late to retract the prize?" Anyway: "On Thursday, Festival President Gilles Jacob presented medals to 30 international film critics, all veterans of Cannes coverage, and two of the awards went to Mary and Richard Corliss, and we were honored to receive them."

"I have to say that I'm parting company with a number of my friends and colleagues here (such as Tony Scott in the New York Times) who have declared the 60th edition one of the best of recent years. I would argue that this is wrong on a few counts." Robert Kohler, blogging at filmjourney.org, actually counts off more than a few; or rather, he's filed his many disappointments into a few overall categories. If you've been thinking you've just missed out on the cinematic event of the 21st century so far, this may - or, of course, may not - assuage your grief.

For Anthony Kaufman, this was a festival of moments: "There were a number of films whose full 2-hour running times left me ultimately bored or annoyed, but within that two-hour-plus span, I was stunned by what I saw." A list of favorites, "in rough order of preference," follows.

Updates, 5/29: Robert Koehler picks up where he left off at filmjourney.org: "[H]anding Fatih Akin (who some of us, deep into some beer-filled nights, began to nickname George W Bush-style as Fatty Atkins) the screenplay prize for the wretchedly structured narrative of The Edge of Heaven is flatly an insult to screenwriting." Yes, that Cinema Scope crowd really does know how to have a good time. Deep insight into just how plain silly a Romanian woman can be when placed under unimaginable pressure... follows.

Patrick Z McGavin revisits some of the highlights for Stop Smiling.

The Palme d'Or winner "lacks the transcendence of the Dardennes brothers," objects Erica Abeel somewhat at Filmmaker, "a great Tolstoyan epiphany - I'm thinking of Resurrection - in which the miscreant performs a back flip of the soul and finds redemption." As for Edge of Heaven, "Too schematic, too much coincidence, carped some critics. To which I'd reply, the artifice is intentional, as patterned and satisfying as figures in a Tabriz carpet."

If you've been reading the items linked to in this entry, this one won't add much you haven't heard before, but still, it's J Hoberman.

"Was this, as many commentators have declared, the best Cannes in years?" asks Dennis Lim at IFC News. "There were relatively few films I whole-heartedly loved (I counted four: Flight of the Red Balloon, Secret Sunshine, Go Go Tales, Paranoid Park), but only the crankiest of critics would grumble about the overall quality. It's worth noting, though, that more than half of my dozen or so favorites screened outside the competition." And that list follows, folks. Go.

Rob Nelson reviews the American presence at Cannes this year for the City Pages.

Updates, 5/30: "In a final festival dispatch from France, indieWIRE offers a subjective hotlist of 10 films worth watching from this year's event."

Michael Lerman presents an annotated top "20 From Cannes."

"Asia didn't need to announce that she was 'Queen of Cannes,' even though she did," blogs Robert Koehler at filmjourney.org. "Anyone with a set of eyes and ears could spot that indisputable fact. What was more remarkable was that she was in at least two exceptional movies - one of them, [Go Go Tales], a certifiable masterpiece - and that whatever transgressive elements lay within the warp and woof of the Breillat belonged entirely to Asia." Further down: "I'm an atheist, for one, and a Darwinian, for another, but the manners in which the physical-mystical in the latest films of [Albert] Serra and Reygadas and Kawase (and one might even add Kiarostami, although his own religious adherences are more subtle and hardly in line with strict Islam) comprise one of the most fascinating and unexpected patterns in new creative cinema."

Todd at Twitch: "Five Things I Learned In Cannes."

Updates, 5/31: A euro|topics dossier gathers and translates assessments of the festival from various European papers, including one in Romania.

"[A]s the world's most important film festival celebrated its 60th birthday, it was tough to shake the feeling that Cannes - or maybe France in general - has become an illusory oasis in an industry where the voice of art too rarely rises above the din of commerce," writes Scott Foundas in an overview of the festival for the LA Weekly.

Updates, 6/1: Online listening tip. John Powers on the highs and lows for NPR - for nearly half an hour, too.

Online browsing tip. Fabrizio Maltese's marvelous photo diary at european-films.net.

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Cannes @ 60. Index.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 27, 2007 11:46 AM