In 2021, French film-maker Julia Ducournau won the Cannes Palme d’Or with her blistering, autoerotic magnum opus Titane. It was a richly deserved victory – a celebration of a bold new voice in cinema. Yet for longstanding fans of body horror – a genre pioneered decades earlier by the Canadian writer-director David Cronenberg – it also felt like karmic payback for the festival’s botched response to Crash, Cronenberg’s controversial 1996 masterpiece, to which Titane is heavily indebted.
During a career spanning six decades and more than 20 feature films, Cronenberg, 81, has inspired everyone from Japanese auteur Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo: The Iron Man) to rising British star Rose Glass (Saint Maud, Love Lies Bleeding). But his brilliant JG Ballard adaptation was denied its own Palme d’Or win thanks largely to the disdain of Cannes jury president Francis Ford Coppola. Instead, Crash earned a “special jury prize”, which Cronenberg called “the jury’s attempt to get around the Coppola negativity”. Speaking in 2021, on the eve of a 4K restoration of Crash, Cronenberg noted sardonically that “I’ve run into [Coppola] several times at various festivals. Always the first thing he says is: ‘Remember, we gave you this award.’ In fact, during the final closing night ceremony he wouldn’t hand me the award. He had someone else hand it to me. He wouldn’t do it himself.”
