Cannes Film Festival 2023: Anatomy of a Fall wins Palme d’Or, Justine Triet is third woman director to bag the award

A year after collecting his second Palme d’Or for Triangle of Sadness, Ruben Ostlund bestowed the same honour on Anatomy of a Fall, director Justine Triet’s thought-provoking legal drama. Triet is only the third woman director to win the Palme d’Or after Julia Ducournau for Titane and Jane Campion for The Piano.

Anatomy of a Fall purports to investigate the guilt or innocence of a popular novelist (Sandra Hüller), accused of murdering her husband. But the film is just as much an inquest of their marriage, bringing out private details from their personal life into the courtroom for the press, public, and audiences to dissect.

Ducournau presented the Grand Prix to The Zone of Interest by Jonathan Glazer. An adaptation of the World War II novel by Martin Amis (who passed away during the festival), the haunting film depicts the private life of the German commandant (Christian Friedel) responsible for executing countless Jews at Auschwitz. The film leaves those horrors largely off-screen, while focusing on the officer and his wife (played by Sandra Hüller), asking audiences to consider the morality of the perpetrators.

The first of the prizes in the official competition went to Japanese actor Koji Yakusho, who plays a working-class Tokyo man in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days. The character spends his mornings cleaning public toilets around the city while leaving himself free time to read books, raise trees and observe the people around him. Best Actress took the packed room by surprise, spotlighting Turkish actor Merve Dizdar for her role as a rural school teacher who challenges the self-centered male protagonist in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s long and philosophical About Dry Grasses.

Directing honours went to Tran Anh Hung for The Pot au Feu. Set in 19th-century France, the mouthwatering feature focuses on the shared passion between a celebrated gourmet (Benoît Magimel) and his cook (Juliette Binoche) of nearly 20 years, which extends from the kitchen to their personal lives. In accepting the prize, the director thanked his wife, then corrected himself, identifying her as “his cook” instead.

Sakamoto Yuji won the screenplay prize for Monster, while Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki took the Jury Prize for Fallen Leaves, a seemingly timeless love story between two strangers struggling to keep their jobs, forced into the present by radio dispatches from the war in Ukraine. (With inputs from IANS)

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