Deserved Palme d’Or for Anatomy of a Fall at Cannes Film Festival

Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall has emerged victorious from a strong edition of the Cannes Film Festival competition. The morally knotty French crime drama, about an author suspected of murdering her emotionally volatile husband, was awarded the Palme d’Or by a jury led by Ruben Östlund, winner last year for Triangle of Sadness and himself no stranger to movies driven by slippery moral uncertainties.

It is only the third time in 76 editions that a film directed by a woman has won the top prize, Triet following Jane Campion (The Piano, 1993) and Julia Ducournau (Titane, 2021), a jury member this year. But there was no sense that this was any kind of political gesture, Anatomy having garnered universal praise from critics after premiering earlier in the festival.

The runner-up Grand Prix went to Jonathan Glazer’s outstanding Auschwitz drama The Zone of Interest, many observers’ pick for best film of the festival. Cannes’s practice of awarding only one award per film meant that there was no acting award for Sandra Hüller, standout German star of both Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest. The Best Actress award went instead to Merve Dizdar, who gives a softly nuanced performance as an amputee at the centre of a love triangle in About Dry Grasses, the latest novelistic epic by Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan (winner for Winter Sleep in 2014).

There were two wins for Japanese talent. Kōji Yakusho won Best Actor for his marvellously understated turn as a Tokyo toilet cleaner in Perfect Days, a welcome return to form from German director Wim Wenders. Meanwhile Yuji Sakamoto took home the Best Screenplay award for his ingeniously circuitous script for Monster, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, a Cannes regular and previous Palme d’Or winner for Shoplifters in 2018.

Best Director went to Vietnamese-born French film-maker Tran Anh Hùng for The Pot-au-Feu, a foodie historical drama starring Juliette Binoche while the third-place Jury Prize was picked up by Fallen Leaves, the latest by Finnish master of deadpan droll Aki Kaurismäki.

The second-tier Un Certain Regard competition was won by How to Have Sex, a British film about fraught carnal discovery among a trio of girls binge-drinking in Crete. The package holiday setting has drawn erroneous comparisons with Aftersun, a standout film at Cannes last year, perhaps because both are debuts by young British women. In fact the films have little in common thematically or tonally.

Nevertheless, How to Have Sex director Molly Manning Walker will be hoping for a repeat of the success enjoyed by Aftersun, which went on to win numerous awards and whose star Paul Mescal was nominated for this year’s Best Actor Oscar. After several years of diminished impact, Cannes has reinstated its status as a springboard for awards success since Parasite went from 2019 Palme d’Or winner to a surprise Academy Award for Best Picture in 2020. Justine Triet and Anatomy of Fall may not have peaked yet.

festival-cannes.com