We’re a week away from this year’s Cannes film festival, and I’m among those tensing with excitement. With new works from Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Glazer, Alice Rohrwacher and Todd Haynes, among others, it’s a tasty lineup. Twenty-one films – seven by female directors, a record for the fest – are jostling for the Palme d’Or, with reigning champion Ruben Östlund leading the jury to determine his successor.
Arguably the most prestigious prize in world cinema, the Palme d’Or nonetheless has a curious legacy. It is subject first to the biases of a festival selection committee that picks the annual handful of contenders, and second to the whims of nine celebrity jurors, who change every year. Though it has a loftier reputation than the best picture Oscar – with which it has only aligned twice in 75 years – it likewise has a history of eccentric calls: take 1986, for example, when Andrei Tarkovsky’s shattering swansong The Sacrifice was pipped by Roland Joffé’s starchy The Mission. David Lynch’s Palme came for one of his most uneven films, Wild at Heart; David Cronenberg has never won one.
Yet by occasional collision of good taste and good fortune, the prize has been bestowed on enough enduringly great films over the years that it retains its lustre. In its best years, it has even planted a flag for the new. 1967’s win for Michelangelo Antonioni’s sculptural, counterculture-influenced anti-mystery Blow-Up has aged very handsomely. Robert Altman’s triumph for the randy, raucous antiwar comedy M*A*S*H a few years later was an early ratification of the New Hollywood movement. Later that decade, Francis Ford Coppola deservedly won twice for the ingeniously paranoid The Conversation (Paramount+) and the epically deranged Apocalypse Now. And when Martin Scorsese’s haunted, post-Vietnam nightmare Taxi Driver took the Palme over the protests of that year’s jury president, Tennessee Williams, the generational handover was confirmed.
In 1989, a new wave of American independent cinema was announced when 26-year-old Steven Soderbergh won for his scuzzy, tangled relationship study Sex, Lies, and Videotape. In the mid-90s, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction landed the prize for meshing arthouse and hyperviolent B-movie tropes with such abandon that its imitators still abound today.
Moving away from American cinema – as Cannes largely has of late, with no US film taking the Palme since Terrence Malick’s glinting spiritual opus The Tree of Life 12 years ago – the prize has had equal success in recognising major international auteurs, from Italian Luchino Visconti’s win for the grandiose sociopolitical swirl in The Leopard to, just three years ago, South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho, with his wicked class-clash thriller Parasite.
Kurosawa has one, for the ravishing samurai warfare of Kagemusha; so does Apichatpong Weerasethakul for his woozy reincarnation meditation Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Among my favourite Palme winners, Wim Wenders landed his for a wistful outsider’s view of crushed American dreams in Paris, Texas, and Lars von Trier for a more violently expressive variation on that theme in his exhilarating experimental musical Dancer in the Dark (Amazon, Curzon). And while Britain has a healthy track record at Cannes, with Palmes for Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Richard Lester among others, our finest hour at the festival might just be Lindsay Anderson winning for his volatile, still startling school rebellion drama If…
Most of these films have a prominent place in the canon, yet some of the greatest Palme d’Or winners aren’t as widely seen or screened. For years I put off watching Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Mubi), a three-hour portrait of a 19th-century peasant community, only to be entranced by its richly inhabited vigour and wit. After not being available online for some time, I was pleased to see that Japanese director Shôhei Imamura’s The Ballad of Narayama can now be streamed on Arrow. About the ritual abandonment of elders to die, it sounds forbidding but has a viscerally poetic payoff. Another happy find is Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying, an intensely moving, humane study of a young Russian woman’s emotional turmoil in wartime, available to stream for free on the official YouTube channel of its studio, Mosfilm.
Would that all winners were so easy to access: Luis Buñuel’s extraordinary Viridiana and the only winner by an African film-maker, the Algerian war epic Chronicle of the Burning Years, are among those currently missing from the streaming realm. As for the 1966 winner, minor sex farce The Birds, the Bees and the Italians, suffice to say that a Palme d’Or doesn’t assure you a spot in the collective cultural memory.
Also new on streaming and VOD
Enys Men
(BFI)
Speaking of Cannes, Cornish indie film-maker Mark Jenkin’s latest premiered at last year’s festival – and its cult of admirers are still chewing on the metaphysical, time-slipping folk horror puzzle it presents, in which the coastal landscape takes on an intangible aura of threat. Count me among those slightly disappointed, however: after the bracing authenticity of Jenkin’s shoestring debut, Bait, this feels sleeker but less striking.
Marcel the Shell With Shoes On
(Universal; available 8 May)
Nominated for this year’s best animated feature Oscar, this hyper-whimsical stop-motion miniature from director Dean Fleischer Camp and comedian Jenny Slate was the clear hipsters’ choice, with its mixture of arch mockumentary framing and cute underdog comedy about a plucky anthropomorphic seashell seeking his long-lost family. The twee factor is high but the execution is daintily clever.
Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.
(Universal)
Perhaps unsurprisingly passed over for a cinema release in the UK, where the satirical target of American megachurches is less likely to resonate with audiences, this is a messy but often jaggedly funny tale of a southern Baptist pastor’s wife attempting to rebuild a congregation in the wake of her husband’s scandalous downfall. Regina Hall’s gutsy, all-in performance holds it together.
