The Palme d'Or for “Titane”, a monster film by Julia Ducournau, second director in the history of the Cannes Film Festival
Julia Ducournau, Palme d'Or for "Titane", with her two main actors, Vincent Lindon and Agathe Rousselle.
© John MACDOUGALL / AFP
Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow
8 mins
It is a Palme d'Or as unexpected as it is deserved for Julia Ducournau.
The 37-year-old French director thus becomes on July 17 the second woman to win the highest distinction of the largest film festival in the world.
"Titane", the story of a monster creature, had the effect of a bomb on the Croisette.
A dozen spectators passed out in the theaters and a jury chaired by the visibly captivated Spike Lee made visible the exceptional character of the work.
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The closing ceremony came close to disaster.
On several occasions, Spike Lee, the president of the jury, almost gave the name of the winner of the Palme d'Or much too soon.
In the end, Julia Ducournau couldn't believe the best news that exists for a filmmaker.
Upset and in tears, she received the Palme d'Or for her very daring work of both raw and unheard-of poetic violence,
Titanium
.
This extraordinary film tells the fate of Alexia.
After a serious car accident with her father, this girl receives a titanium plate in her brain.
The beginning of a transformation into a transgender and almost extraplanetary creature.
See also Winners of the 74th Cannes Film Festival: relive the coronation of Julia Ducournau with "Titane"
"
Perfection is a dead end
"
Almost thirty years after
Jane Campion's
Piano Lesson
in 1993, Julia Ducournau then became - thanks to a predominantly female jury - the second woman in the history of the Cannes Film Festival among the winners of the Palme d'Or.
In her speech, the director, born November 18, 1983 in Paris and graduated from Fémis in 2008, confided that she no longer believed in perfection: “
Perfection is not a pipe dream, it is a dead end.
And monstrosity is a weapon and a force to push back the walls of normativity.
There is so much freedom to be found that one cannot put in a box.
Thank you to the jury for recognizing the desire for a more inclusive and more fluid world.
Please call for more diversity in cinema experiences and in our lives.
And thank you for bringing in the monsters.
"
Interpreted by Agathe Rousselle, the figure of the monster neither man nor woman, but with a human appearance, defies the codes of the usual narration.
Emotions, gender, relationships between humans and species, everything is called into question.
The new world makes its way through the budding love of this mutant warrior with a firefighter commander (the authoritarian and blind virility, embodied by Vincent Lindon) as strange as she is.
It is Vincent Lindon who embodies with certain madness this virile, authoritarian and completely blind man concerning the unexplained disappearance of his son.
Already in her first feature film, Julie Ducournau had let in the monsters.
Grave
explored the life of a medical student with a penchant for anthropophagy.
The Grand Prix tied for Asghar Farhadi and Juho Kuosmanen
The Grand Prize was awarded to Iranian director Asghar Farhadi for his moral tale
A hero
and to Finnish filmmaker Juho Kuosmanen for his second feature film
Compartment n ° 6
, a journey as bizarre as it is initiatory by a young Finnish student from Moscow. in Murmansk.
An adventure undertaken to discover the Neolithic petroglyphs of this city in the Far North.
As for Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, like his main character in the film, he seems to be trying to settle his debts to Iranian society.
When receiving the award, he confided that he had thought of his first short film made 36 years ago: “
For 36 years, I have done nothing but write, despite all the obstacles and pressures. .
Despite everything, I continue to have hope to help improve things, my country, to raise awareness…
”
"
Drive my car
"
impressed
Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi seems to have been rather disappointed not to have received the Palme d'Or by receiving the award for Best Screenplay. Indeed,
Drive my car
impressed. Each minute of the 2:59 hours of this Japanese road movie seems essential to tell with incredible delicacy and deep calm the story and especially the love of a couple of artists. He, a famous man of the theater, is
directing Uncle Vanya
by Chekhov.
She creates her scripts for television always from personally experienced love scenes.
And teaches him the roles of his pieces always with a cassette recorded by his wife whose voice accompanies him in his fetish red car, even beyond the sudden death of his wife.
Then comes another mysterious young woman who gets behind the wheel of her car, but also a former lover of his wife to interpret her role in Chekhov's play.
The staging will this time be multilingual, including a role in Korean sign language.
A cinematographic journey to other horizons that we are not ready to forget.
The Performances Awards to Renate Reinsve and Caleb Landry Jones
Renate Reinsve, 33-year-old Norwegian actress, won the Best Actress award. She gave orchestral form to the different stages of Julie's life.
Julie (in 12 chapters)
, directed by Joachim Trier, follows the story of a very gifted young woman whose sentimental search for a right path in life is complex and very revealing of our time.
The Best Actor Award went to American actor and musician Caleb Landry Jones, 31.
In the Australian film
Nitram
by Justin Kurzel, he shows us the evolution of a boy like no other, to the man visibly suffering from a mental illness, nevertheless able to quietly procure weapons of war.
Result: the massacre of Port Arthur in 1996 which remains a national trauma in Australia.
“
Le Genou d'Ahed
”
and
“
Memoria
”
, tied for the Jury Prize
The Jury Prize was awarded to two of the most ambitious films in the competition. Israeli director Nadav Lapid thanked "
all the irrational and reckless who contributed to
Ahed's Knee." An unexpected work, as demanding as it is provocative, confronting the spectator and the policies of the Israeli government with the same violence. In the form of a back and forth between reality and fiction, he advances the story with moments of poetry, political sequences and sentimental eructations. An unclassifiable style giving the feature film unheard-of power. And the main role, actor and choreographer Avshalom Pollak, makes the camera dance and rock more than once to disturb our cinematographic certainties.
Memoria
, by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, talks about “
this vibration of memories that connects us to each other… I would like to send this vibration of hope to everyone. Let’s be at peace with each other.
“More than ten years after his Palme d'Or for
Uncle Boonmee
in 2010, the Thai filmmaker has once again thrilled the sensibilities of the jury with his cinematographic work as mysterious as it is magical.
Memoria
is the story of a woman haunted by a detonation, an elusive noise, which sends her back to unknown universes. While visiting Colombia, Jessica (Tilda Swinton) discovers that she is connected in an unsuspected way with the inhabitants of this unknown country. The Thai artist and filmmaker toured outside his country for the first time, but he stuck to his belief in images inhabited more by spirits than reason. Despite an international cast with Tilda Swinton and Jeanne Balibar, each shot turns into an invitation to meditate on the sound and invisible universe. A unique experience. The rhythm of the images seems to follow the forces of nature giving the impression that it is the image and not the spectator who must take the first step to allow this revelation called cinema.
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