Call it detente: In a year of Franco-American squabbling over Iraq, a U.S. movie, Gus Van Sant's Elephant, won the Palme d'Or last night as best film at France's showcase festival, the world's biggest.
Elephant, which also earned Van Sant the best director award, was one of three films to get two prizes each at the 56th Cannes Film Festival. The others were Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand's wonderfully bittersweet comedy The Barbarian Invasions (Les Invasions Barbares) and Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Uzak.
But the surprise win by Van Sant's controversial high school bloodbath -- the award was jeered by many film critics when it was announced -- put a shocking capper on a decidedly mediocre Cannes fest, the worst in years. The disappointment is especially acute when Elephant is compared to last year's Palme d'Or winner, Roman Polanski's holocaust drama The Pianist. "To win," Van Sant said, "is kind of miraculous and fortunate and lucky."
Elephant, inspired by the real-life events at Columbine, is a loosely disguised fiction about a high school massacre carried out by two dissaffected and heavily armed teenagers.
For Van Sant to win as best director, the jury headed by French director Patrice Chereau had to get special permission to bend the rules. Usually, a film is not allowed to receive more than one award unless the second prize is for best actor or best actress, as was the case for both the Canadian and Turkish films.
The Barbarian Invasions earned Arcand the best screenplay award while Marie-Josee Croze ( absent because she was shooting a TV show in Canada yesterday) won as best actress, beating out Nicole Kidman, star of bombastic Dane Lars von Trier's Dogville, which was shut out of the awards. Croze is only the second Canadian ever to win as best actress. Monique Mercure, sharing it in a tie with Shelley Duvall (3 Women), won the award for the Quebec film J.A. Martin: Photographe in 1977 .
"And she didn't work for the next two years, I swear to God -- and that says something about Canada," Arcand quipped in the aftermath of the awards ceremony. Arcand joked that, when Croze was informed by telephone, "It seems she yelled and then she fainted."
Arcand was amusing all night about the honours bestoyed upon his film. "We were not expecting it at all," he said of the best screenplay prize instead of the Palme d'Or, "so we were delighted by what we got."
Many pundits had predicted The Barbarian Invasions would win. Arcand said he wasn't in agreement. "Generally, comedies don't win prizes at festivals -- it's quite classic." Even Charlie Chaplin -- the late comic genius whose 1936 classic Modern Times officially closed the Cannes fest last night in a newly restored digital print -- never won a best film Oscar, Arcand noted.
The top prize, he said, tends to go to serious and sometimes very violent films. He did not mention it by name but that describes Elephant.
The Palme d'Or, Arcand said, is "too important, it's too serious, to give it to a comedy film."
The Turkish film was a different story. The best actor prize, handed out by English star Elizabeth Hurley, went jointly to two amateur actors, Muzaffer Ozdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak. Ozdemir, apparently, was "too shy" to come to Cannes for the ceremony. But Toprak was not here because he was killed in a car accident after Cannes announced Uzak for the competition.
Other awards included the Camera d'Or for best first film to Danish director Christoffer Boe for Recontruction and the Jury Prize to Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf for her Afghan women's drama, At Five O'Clock in The Afternoon.
