The Cannes jury, composed of Brie Larson, Paul Dano, Maryam Touzani, Denis Ménochet, Rungano Nyoni, Afghan author Atiq Rahimi and Damián Szifrón, has spent the last ten days watching 21 competition films.
Two-time Palme d’Or winner Ruben Ostlund presided over them. Ostlund mentioned at the start of the festival that his jury would gather to deliberate every three films over the course of the 10 day festival. This means they have deliberated around half a dozen times so far.
When voting begins either tonight, and/or tomorrow morning, each juror will get one vote, including the president. For the last ten days jurors were instructed to keep a tight lid on their reactions and not react or give an opinion on the movies they were seeing.
The last two competition films were screened today: Ken Loach’s “The Old Oak” and Alice Rohrwacher’s “La Chimera.” This means that all of the films in this year’s competition have now been seen. A few of them stand out as obvious Palme d’Or contenders, others not so much.
This has been a strong Cannes edition, and some films just seem to be buzzing around the Palme; Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” and Tran Anh Hung’s “The Pot A Feu” come to mind.
My money is on Triet’s masterful film — a Hitchcockian drama about a novelist who gets accused of killing her husband. Coincidences and clues start to pile up, but there’s still an uncertainty that invades this film. The viewer never really knows who to trust. The ambiguity is damn-near perverse.
Another film that’s being predicted for the Palme is Glazer’s. This was a chilly art film, through and through. There’s no other way to put it. ‘Zone’ is a meticulously delivered and minimalist 104-minute film — a clinically constructed treatise on the banality of evil. However, will the jury be able to warm up to, what I described a week ago, as an “ice-cold anti-drama”.
It needs to be said that critics don’t choose the Palme, we are reminded that every year. Instead, we have an eclectic jury, filled with wide-ranging tastes —they have to come together and agree on a single film for the big prize. It’s a daunting task.
Again, this year we might have some critically panned works winning some of the awards. Director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire is rumored to have been called back to attend Saturday’s awards ceremony — he directed competition entry “Black Flies,” currently 27% rotten on RT.
Jessica Hausner, whose “Club Zero” was the worst film I saw in competition, was also spotted today at a screening of the Rohrwacher’s “La Chimera.”
Edward Berger seems to have settled on what comes next. His Lance Armstrong biopic, starring Austin Butler, is now holding casting calls, with production eyed for January.