It wasn't a great year in Cannes.

This can be seen in the decisions of the nine-member jury around the American director Spike Lee.

In a competition with no spectacular highlights, the jury was looking for a film with which they could set an example, and they found it.

The golden palm for Julia Ducournau's “Titane”, however, rewards less a masterpiece of cinema than a film that has little to do with conventional ideas of narrative ability.

In the story of a fire chief, played by the French Vincent Lindon, and a murderous young woman with a titanium plate in her head, some things are wrong, such as the characters' motivation for their actions.

Andreas Kilb

Feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.

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But there are blatant and brightly colored pictures to see, plenty of nudity and violence, sex with a car and a striptease on a fire engine.

Because Ducournau's genre mix of motifs from horror, family and action cinema plays with clichés of masculinity and femininity, which he first visually inflates and then lets burst, the film should serve as an illustration in future gender debates.

She knows that “Titane” is not perfect, said the French director at the award ceremony, but perfection is sterile.

One can argue about it.

The prizes reveal the division of the jury

The other prizes reveal just as much the dividedness of the jury as their embarrassment to choose the right one from the twenty-four entries in the festival competition. This applies to the jury's grand prize, which was shared between Asghar Farhadi's Iranian drama “Ghahreman” (A Hero) and Juho Kuosmanen's Finnish railway adventure “Hytti No. 6” (compartment No. 6), as well as the jury award, which the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul ("Memoria") and his Israeli colleague Nadav Lapid ("Ahed's knee") had to share. The script award for Rysuke Hamaguchi (“Drive My Car”) and the directing award for Leos Carax (“Annette”) are among those awards that can be described as consolation for lost important trophies - actually it could just as easily have been the other way around.The honors for the Norwegian Renate Reinsve (best actress for “Verdens verste menneske” by Joachim Trier) and the American Caleb Landry Jones (best actor in Justin Kurzel's “Nitram”) are highly deserved: both shone in Cannes.

The fact that Léa Seydoux did not receive a prize despite three leading roles in the competition films was nevertheless surprising. In Bruno Dumont's “France” on Thursday, she finally had that big performance that she had been allowed to do for a long time. As a star television reporter in a life crisis, she played the real stars of the news industry elegantly on the wall. Four days earlier, of course, it had become known that Seydoux would not come to Cannes because she had contracted the corona virus. So she was spared disappointment on the last evening. The guests, spectators and accredited people of the festival were reminded once again that in 2021 nothing was as usual on the Croisette. May it be different next year.