by Helen Barlow
Ultimately, they awarded Sean Baker’s Anora the Palme d’Or and the critics in Screen Daily’s much read critics poll also gave the film the highest score. The film stars Mikey Madison as a Russian-American sex worker, who on a drug-drenched whim, marries the young son of a Russian oligarch and must deal with his parents who are keen for an annulment. Variety noted that “Sean Baker’s whirlwind sex work romance sparkles in its leading lady’s hair.”
On stage, Baker devoted the film “to all sex workers past, present and future. This is for you.” He got down on his knees in thanks to George Lucas who handed him the award and noted that Francis Ford Coppola (who had just presented a career tribute to Lucas) and David Cronenberg (whose film The Shrouds also played in competition alongside Coppola’s Megalopolis) had a profound influence on him as a filmmaker. Baker said he had always dreamt of winning the Palme d’Or and gave a huge endorsement of cinema as a communal experience that should be watched on the big screen.
Gerwig later told the press that the jury had “led with our hearts and with everything we watched we were transported by something. Anora reminded us of classic Lubitsch and Howard Hawks and every performance, their faces, we loved so much. We wanted to be on this journey with them.”
French director Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language musical, Emilia Perez [above], took out the Jury Prize as well as the best actress award given exceptionally to four performers: Karla Sofia Gascon, Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldana and Adriana Paz. Gascon was the only actress in attendance and gave an emotional speech as the first trans actor to win the Cannes award, and dedicated her win to “all trans people who are suffering. We all have the opportunity to change for the better, to be better people. If you have made us suffer, it is time for you also to change.” In the film, she plays a male Mexican cartel boss who is married to Gomez and is desperate to become a woman. The film had screened to an uproarious response.
Regarding giving the award to four women, Gerwig told the press room” “Everyone was shining and they were all a unit and it felt like to separate them undermined the magic of what they created together. That’s something we felt in a lot of films, that it was women together and that is something we wanted to honour when we gave this award. Each of them is a stand-out but together they’re transcendent.”
This was also the case with the Grand Prix winner, Payal Kapadia’s dramedy All We Imagine as Light [above], which follows a pair of nurses searching for romantic connection in Mumbai. Kapadia said she worked completely in collaboration with her actresses, who looked stunning on stage in saris. All We Imagine as Light was the first Indian film to compete in Cannes for 30 years.
Demi Moore [above], who likewise had a strong collaboration with Margaret Qualley in The Substance, was in the audience and must have been disappointed for missing out on the best actress prize for what many described as her career comeback. Instead, the film’s writer/director, French horror maestro Coralie Fargeat won for best screenplay. Moore plays a fading celebrity who takes an illicit drug which creates a younger version of herself – and she turns into a youthful Margaret Qualley. But the transition is only temporary, which is where the rot sets in.
The best actor award went to Jesse Plemons [above] (who was no longer in Cannes) for Kinds of Kindness where director Yorgos Lanthimos returns to the more absurd approach of his earlier films before he hit the big time with the more commercial Poor Things and The Favourite. Many thought that Ben Whishaw might win for his portrayal as Russian dissident writer and politician, Edouard Limonov, in Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov’s English-language debut, Limonov: The Ballad. Sebastian Stan was impressive too as a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice [below], though a second award after his best actor win in Berlin for A Different Man was unlikely.
Screening only on Friday, Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof [below] had garnered intense favour with critics for The Seed of the Sacred Fig and accepted a Special jury award while receiving a lengthy standing ovation at the ceremony. Rasoulof, facing eight years’ jail time and lashes as a punishment for making the film, had fled Iran on foot and incredibly made it to Cannes. Perhaps like Paris-based Iranian actresses, Golshifteh Farahani and Zar Amir Ebrahimi, he will find a new home abroad, though he is not saying where or if that will definitely happen. Interestingly, the film focuses on an investigating judge within the same judicial system that was attempting to jail him.
The best director prize went to Miguel Gomes for the Portuguese film, Grand Tour [below], which Variety describes as a “dreamy, delirious time-swirling travelogue through East and Southeast Asia.”
