Cannes results

Dave Calhoun reports on the winners at this year's festival.

May 29 2007

On Sunday night, one of the best Cannes film festivals in years came to a close and the Palme d'Or was awarded to a Romanian film by a little-known director - and what a smart decision it was on the part of Stephen Frears and his jury to give world cinema's most prestigious prize to Cristian Mungiu's excellent '4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days', a film which has already been feted in earlier reports on these pages.

The Romanian winner is a tough work as it deals head-on with harrowing issues: a student seeks an abortion on the back streets of late '80s Bucharest and pushes the usual boundaries of friendship along the way. But as filmmaking it's exciting, clever, artful, suspenseful and blessed with excellent performances from its two female Romanian leads, Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasiliu. It was the film that most critics at the festival were raving about ever since it screened on the first full-day of the festival and as Cannes continued to roll on it was the one movie that would inevitably rise to the surface whenever someone asked you to name a film that had truly moved you.

It's good news too that the Cannes jury decided to give the directing prize to painter-filmmaker Julian Schnabel for his third feature 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly', an inventive adaptation of Parisian magazine editor Jean-Dominque Bauby's 1997 memoir of 'locked-in' syndrome following a stroke at the age of 43. Especially considering its origins as literature and the opportunity for carving a cloying bedside tale from its material, the film is brilliantly cinematic, imaginative and emotional in all the right ways.

But then some other prizes were more surprising. To give the Grand Prix - the festival's second prize - to Naomi Kawase's 'Mourning Forest' is a strange decision and maybe reflects a lack of unanimity on the part of the jury. Only half an hour into this whimsical and annoying Japanese story of a friendship between an elderly man and his carer, the audience at the main press screening that I attended began to leave in droves. The film was one of the very last to screen at the festival and so perhaps scribes were just too jaded after 12 days in the dark to appreciate what at very best was a middling work.

The acting prizes went to cast members of two films that were barely lauded, although it's hard to argue against the winners' individual contributions. Russia's Konstantin Lavronenko took the actor prize for his role in Andrei Zviagintsev's 'The Banishment', a film which failed to live up to the director's earlier 'The Return', despite its astonishing camerawork and impressive debt to Tarkovsky. And South Korea's Jeon Do-yeon won the best actress award for Lee Chang-dong's 'Secret Sunshine', a solid if unexceptional work about a single mother dealing with grief after the death of her husband and then her son.

The jury handed a shared special jury prize to two impressive films, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's 'Persepolis' - a feature animation of Satrapi's much-praised series of comic books - and Carlos Reygadas' 'Stellet Licht' - an austere drama about adultery and heartbreak in a Mennonite community in Mexico that owed a great debt to Dreyer and further confirmed Reygadas as a master of mise-en-scène.

By the time the festival closed at the weekend, critics were in agreement that this year's Cannes boasted one of the event's strongest selections for many years.

• 
•