#RSatCannes: Four Films That Deserved the Palme d’Or and The One That Got It

The 76th Cannes Film Festival, which concluded last week, was one of the biggest and starriest in recent memory. 

Several big Hollywood films premiered during the 11-day festival, including Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Michael Douglas received an honorary Palme d’Or and Quentin Tarantino announced that his next and final film is titled, The Movie Critic.

But it was the festival’s main competition section that was the most thrilling.

Amongst the 21 films competing for the Palme d’Or, film world’s most prestigious award, there were four films by directors who have won the Palme d’Or once (Italian director Nanni Moretti for The Son’s Room, Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda for Shoplifters, Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan for Winter Sleep, German director Wim Wenders for Paris, Texas), and one by a director who has won it twice — Britain’s Ken Loach (The Wind That Shakes the Barley and I, Daniel Blake).

Making the daunting task of picking one winner almost impossible for the nine-member jury which was led by the two-time Palme d’Or winner Ruben Ostlund (Swedish director who has won the trophy for Triangle for Sadness and Force Majeure).

But, of course, not all films were great. 

In the line-up were some shocking duds, led from the front by Wes Anderson’s bizarre and pointless sci-fi, Asteroid City. The only thing that kept me in my seat was the parade of Hollywood’s biggest stars, including Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Steve Carell, Adrien Brody, Matt Dillon, Willem Defoe, Jeff Goldblum…    

Some films, like Black Flies, about paramedics and their god complex, starring Sean Penn and Tye Sheridan, Tunisian docu-drama Four Daughters by Kaouther Ben Hania about a woman whose two daughters join the ISIS, French film Le Retour by Catherine Corsini about a mother and her three daughters coming to terms with their past, were good. 

And some were very good — like Kidnapped, by Italian director Marco Bellocchio which tells the true story of the Pope, the church’s antisemitism and the kidnapping of a child, Monster by Hirokazu Kore-eda about two boys clashing with the adults around them. Then, there was Chinese documentary Youth (Spring) by Wang Bing that takes a peek at the life of young men and women responsible for the ‘Made in China’ label on high-street clothing brands, and Ken Loach’s The Old Oak, a heartfelt film about Syrian refugees in an English town.

And then there were five stellar films, all of whom could have taken the Palme d’Or.

Some of these films will come to the theatres, others will play at international film festivals in India and abroad. Wherever you can catch them, watch them.

Perfect Days

Directed by Win Wenders

Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), the central character of Perfect Days, lives alone in a small house in Tokyo and follows a set, daily routine.

A janitor with The Tokyo Toilet, on workdays he wakes up at the crack of dawn and opens his bedroom window. He looks up at the sun, the sky, the trees and smiles. Then he brushes his teeth, waters his potted plants that are arranged neatly on a table, gets into his blue overalls and picks up a can of coffee from a vending machine before setting out to work. In his large van that’s stacked with mops, buckets, disinfectants and gloves, he slips in a cassette and listens to rock. Van Morrison is a particular favorite, and Nina Simone’s jazz blues is reserved for particular days.

As German director Wim Wenders’ film takes us on a tour of Tokyo’s famous public toilets, we watch Hirayama clean each one with the attention and dedication of an artist.  

He breaks for lunch in a garden where he eats a sandwich and takes photos of trees from an old camera-with-a-film-roll. He smiles when he spots the familiar figure of a homeless man who collects twigs and dances around trees. And sometimes, when he spots a small tree sprouting in the shade of a bigger tree, he rescues it and brings it home. At night, he reads William Faulkner.

On weekends, he cycles to a laundromat, visits a photo shop where he hands over his camera roll and collects last week’s developed photos. Then he goes to a local bar, a small eatery before retiring at night with Faulkner.  

Most days he barely utters a word, not even to his colleague whose raucous voice feels like a rude disruption in Hirayama’s meditative, peaceful, gloriously silent world. 

We know little about Hirayama, but figure from his troubled dreams and the visit of his niece, Niko, that some tragedy lurks in his past. We also figure that he has insulated himself from it by immersing himself in a simple daily routine, doing things that he loves.  

Perfect Days should have but it didn’t win the Palme d’Or. But Koji Yakusho won the best actor award. There is a longish sequence at the end of Perfect Days that probably clinched it in his favor. 

After Hirayama’s sister arrives to take her daughter Niko back home, he shares a lovely, playful evening with a stranger who has a few days to live. 

The next morning as Hirayama sets out for work, he picks a Nina Simone cassette. As she sings, Sun in the sky/You know how I feel, tears roll down Hirayama’s cheeks. And as she gets to the chorus — “I’m feeling good” — Hirayama smiles and his tears dance at the edge of his eyes. He lets them roll down again and cries. But smiles again when she sings, “It’s a new dawn/It’s a new day/It’s a new life.”

We don’t know what is bothering him. Is it loneliness? Past incidents that still hurt, or just the unbearable and overwhelming joy and sadness of being? 

Wenders’ film is like the folded paper that Hirayama finds one day while cleaning a public toilet. Someone has marked ‘o’ in the middle square of a game of knots and crosses. Hirayama marks an ‘x’, folds the paper and slips it back in the nook. 

Germans have words for almost everything. But I can’t find the word to describe Wenders’ Perfect Days. Perhaps what I’m looking for is the English word, perfection.  

The Zone of Interest

Directed by Jonathan Glazer 

British-Jewish director Jonathan Glazer’s German film, The Zone of Interest, opens with a black screen and lots of white noise. It’s emotionally disturbing and lasts a while, but then the film cuts to a calm scene of prosaic domesticity. A family is having a picnic at a riverside. The mother is cradling a baby, the young boys and their father are wet from a swim in the river.  

This is the family of SS commandant Rudolf Hob (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig Hö (Sandra Hüller) who live in a lovely house. 

Flowers are blooming in their massive garden which has a swimming pool. But right outside is a tall, imposing, grey cement wall with barbed wire. It’s also visible from many of their bedroom windows. On the other side of this wall is the Auschwitz concentration camp and gas chambers, the Nazis’ largest extermination center where “the final solution” was carried out.

Based on a novel of the same name by Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest tells the fictionalized but true story of Rudolf Hoss, the founder and first commandant of Auschwitz who lived with his wife and five children in a villa just 30 meters from the camp fence, and 170 m from the crematorium chimney.

Glazer’s The Zone of Interest doesn’t venture into the concentration camp. But its effects make their way to the commandant’s house.

A gardener brings a cloth bag full of canned food and clothes. Hedwig hands over the dresses to pick one each, but takes the mink coat to her bedroom. She tries it on, strikes glamorous poses in front of her dressing table mirror and when she finds a lipstick in its pocket, she tries that on as well.

Throughout the film, like when Rudolf discusses the architecture and mechanics of a larger crematorium that he wants to build in Auschwitz, or when the family meets for dinner, when the kids are playing, we hear screams, shots being firing, see fire and smoke rising from the massive chimneys beyond the wall.

We watch with horrified fascination when Hedwig laughs as the wife of another SS officer talks about finding diamonds in a toothpaste tube. And when Hedwig, who likes being called “the queen of Auschwitz,” refuses to move from her dream house when her husband is transferred. 

Most films about the Holocaust show the horror of it because it is hard to imagine. They make us see the inhumanity, the unimaginable capacity for violence and desire to inflict suffering. Somewhere those films satisfy our morbid curiosity to stare evil in the face and see what it is capable of.  

The Zone of Interest doesn’t oblige. It demands that we recall, we imagine, we join the dots. Of course, it can exist only because all those films existed before it. But the impact of this decision, to not visit the concentration camp, is in many ways more chilling. We have to reconcile with the fact that a Nazi official who at night worries about his little daughter who has strange nightmares and sleepwalks, can very casually also discuss how the new crematorium that he is building will make it easy to “load, burn, cool down, unload, load again” 400-500 people at a time. 

For the longest time I have been in love with Glazer’s 2000 film, Sexy Beast, a brilliant and insanely funny British crime film starring Ben Kingsley (he received an Oscar nomination for his performance).  

The Zone of Interest is a creature of another, very different world. It requires a totally different directorial vision, sensibility, cinematic skill and political ideology. 

The film won the Grand Prix, the second highest award at the Cannes Film Festival.     

Fallen Leaves

Directed by Aki Kaurismäki 

Aki Kaurismäki, Finland’s most famous director, is also the most temperamental one.

In 2003, when his film, The Man Without A Past, was nominated for an Oscar, he didn’t attend the ceremony in protest against the US’ war on Iraq. In 2002, he boycotted the New York Film Festival because the Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami, was not given a US visa in time for the festival. And at the recently-held 76th Cannes Film Festival, while he was walking into the Grand Theatre Lumiere for the world premiere of his latest film, Fallen Leaves, Kaurismäki spent a considerable amount of time doing red-carpet natak. He joked with the photographers, made faces, struck funny poses. 

Even after his film was over and he and his crew were receiving a standing-ovation from 2,300 people in the hall, he could not stand still. He blew flying kisses to thank everyone but kept goofing around. And when the festival director, Thierry Frémaux, tried to hand him a mic to say a few words, Kaurismäki gestured that he wanted to go out for a smoke. He rushed out soon after.

Many directors wear their accomplishments lightly. But Aki Kaurismäki, a master of films that are bleak and humane, political and comic, seems to want to have nothing to do with his films after he has made them. 

There’s a melancholic playfulness and unpredictability about him. As if he doesn’t know how to be in the public glare except to try not to be. Many of his characters share this trait. 

Kaurismäki once told a newspaper, “When all the hope is gone, there is no reason for pessimism.” 

Fallen Leaves, a tender romance, is set in that sort of hopeless and hopeful situation in Helsinki. Ansa (Alma Pöysti) stocks shelves at a supermarket and one night she meets Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), a factory worker, at a karaoke bar. Both lose their jobs, both find new, but worse jobs. Both like each other but life keeps bringing them together and then separating them. 

Kaurismäki said in an interview that he decided to make Fallen Leaves because the war in Ukraine made him “feel like this bloody world needed some love stories.”

Fallen Leaves unfolds like an album of images, with characters drinking, eating, going to the movies, caressing a dog while bulletins about the Ukraine war are broadcast on radio. 

There is more stillness and little motion in Fallen Leaves, as if the film’s pace is in sync with the pace of Ansa and Holappa’s lives. 

All the characters are laconic. They speak very little, and when they do, they do it flatly, in a way that is the opposite of performance.  

Aki Kaurismäki’s minimalist style of filmmaking has been called Bressonian, after French master director Robert Bresson who made masterpieces like Pickpocket (1959) and Au Hasard Balthazar (1966). But there’s a romance and rhythm in Kaurismäki’s minimalism that is his own.

Each frame in Fallen Leaves is composed like a stunning pastiche of noir. There’s a hint of existentialism, but in bright, warm colors. The spaces that characters occupy evoke bleakness, but the characters themselves evoke hope. Though stuck in desperate situations, they seek love and companionship.

Aki Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves is a gem of a film that won many hearts and the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

About Dry Grasses

Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, about human frailties, egos and relationships, is 3 hours and 17 minutes long. And there’s not a moment in the film that’s extra or excess. Not even the long sequence in the beginning when a man gets down from a bus and walks to a house through knee-high snow in real time. 

The film, set in a school in Anatolia, is about Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), an art teacher who is serving his fourth year of compulsory residence teaching kids in rural schools. 

Samet constantly talks about missing Istanbul, wanting to move back because the people around him are not people like him. Not even the younger teacher, Kenan (Musab Ekici), with whom he shares a house.

But there’s a student at school who makes Samet smile — a pretty 14-year-old girl, Sevim (Ece Bagci). The way he behaves with her, and the informality with which she talks to him in the privacy of his room feel odd.  

During a surprise check in school for phones and jewellery, a teacher finds a love letter that Sevim has written. It’s addressed to Samet and there is nothing to indicate that she was planning to share it with anyone. 

Samet gets hold of it and is reading it when Sevim, humiliated and mortified, comes to his room to ask for the letter. He denies having the letter. She weeps, begs, but he doesn’t relent.

The line that Samet crossed earlier with Sevim are blurry, but the choices he makes now are cold moves of a narcissist.

The next day Sevim and another classmate lodge a complaint of abuse against Samet and Kenan.

Meanwhile, Samet has introduced Kenan to Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a beautiful, intelligent, teacher at a larger school in a nearby town. It irritates him that she prefers the company of the simpler Kenan to him and begins to manipulate and court Nuray. But Nuray sees through him and in a riveting conversation over drinks and dinner, challenges him for constantly complaining about the way things are from the sidelines and talks of “the weariness of hope,” a reference to the recently-concluded, emotionally charged elections in Turkey.  

The film’s long run time and set-piece conversations are broken sometimes by the photographs that Samet takes of people in rural Anatolia, faces that he claims to detest, and once when Samet opens a door and walks backstage, and we find ourselves standing outside the film, desperate to leave the real world and get back to make-believe.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films are cerebral, political and move from one conversation to another. 

Watching About Dry Grasses felt like reading an engaging fiction book — the kind where our eyes are reading the text and simultaneously our mind is conjuring images that are animated by the words. 

Ceylan manages to pull off this impossible dance of words and images in About Dry Grasses. 

About Dry Grasses is his ninth film that he has co-written with his wife, Ebru Ceylan. The film doesn’t have the heft of Winter Sleep, but it has compassion for all its characters, a throbbing heart and stunning performances. Merve Dizdar won the Palme for her performance as Nuray, the activist-teacher with a disability. 

Anatomy of a Fall

Directed by Justine Triet

Anatomy of A Fall is a tense and gripping French courtroom drama about a husband, a wife and an investigation into a marriage that’s triggered by a mysterious death.

Sandra (played by German actress Sandra Hüller who is also in The Zone of Interest), is a successful novelist who, along with her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis), son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) and their dog Snoop has moved from London to a chalet in rural France, to be close to Samuel’s hometown.

In the film’s first scene, Sandra is being interviewed about her novels and how she draws inspiration for her plot and characters from her own life when her husband, an aspiring writer and teacher, starts playing the instrumental version of “P.I.M.P.” by 50 Cent very loudly and on a loop.

We don’t see him, but feel him intruding. His disregard for the guest and determination to draw attention to himself feels almost violent.

Soon, Samuel is found dead. To Sandra it looks like a suicide, to others it looks like murder.

Accused of killing her husband, Sandra is on trial and has to prove her innocence. But as forensic evidence is produced in court, it’s not just her role in his death that is being probed, but also her attitude to her marriage. 

When secret audio recordings that Samuel made of their arguments are played out in court, she has to defend herself for being successful and for being unapologetic about having ambitions and priorities other than being a wife and a mother. 

As the prosecution remains fixated on Sandra’s cheating, stealing story ideas from Samuel, her neglect of her family, her son, who is visually impaired, is called to testify.   

French director Justine Triet’s Anatomy of A Fall won the Palme d’Or at the 76th Cannes Film Festival. Triet, 44, is the third woman ever to take home the film world’s top prize.  

And Snoop (real name Messi), a border collie, won the Palm Dog, an unofficial award show at Cannes that celebrates doggie performances in films.