Swedish satire “Triangle of Sadness” wins the Palme d’Or
Stand: 28.05.2022
Ruben Ostlund, film director from Sweden, receives the Palme d’Or for the film “Triangle of Sadness”
Quelle: Getty Images/Gareth Cattermole
Lots of different opinions and no clear favorite – that indicated a vintage without a film that stood out. Ultimately, the Palme d’Or at the 75th Cannes Film Festival went to the Swedish satire “Triangle of Sadness”, which settles accounts with the world of the super-rich.
Dhe Palme d’Or at the 75th Cannes Festival went to Swedish satire Triangle of Sadness by Ruben Östlund, whose second Palm in five years after winning The Square in 2017. After satirizing the art world in Square” begins as a satire on the modeling business, but increasingly becomes a nasty reckoning with the division of our society into the super-rich and super-poor, eventually turning the pyramid upside down.
If you asked six critics at the end of the festival which film would win the Palme d’Or and why, you got six different answers: Park chan-wook’s romantic police thriller “Decision to Leave” because of its staging sophistication or Kirill Serebrennikov’s “Tchaikovsky’s Wife” for that Portrait of a society that ignores homosexuality at all costs, or Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Les Amandiers” for the wild exuberance of its young protagonists, or Ruben Östlund’s “Triangle of Sadness” or Ali Abbasis’s Iranian serial killer drama “Holy Spider” – and even Jerzy Skolimowski’s experimental ” Eo” was mentioned.
Scene from the movie “Triangle of Sadness”
Source: dpa/Fredrik-Wenzel
So many different opinions and no clear favourite, it indicated a vintage without a film that stood out. Lukas Dhont’s “Close” was added one day before the end.
The disaster of 2021 should not be repeated
The festival had learned from the disaster of 2021, when jury president Spike Lee accidentally announced the palm winner right at the start. Several safeguards were built in: the presenter of the award ceremony, the actress Virginie Efira, first called a guest star onto the stage, who passed the floor on to jury president Vincent Lindon, who finally had a member of his jury announce the winner.
The best actress was Zar Amir Ebrahimi from Iran, as a journalist who investigates the series of murders in “Holy Spider”, which the Iranian police do not really want to solve – a film that shows everything that cannot be shown in Iran: violence against Women, sex, political interference in the judiciary. The film had to be shot in Jordan, and the question remains as to which of the participants will be able to continue living in Iran.
Tarik Saleh, Best Screenplay writer for Boy in Heaven, also prefers not to go back to his native Egypt (he was born in Stockholm). His film describes the power struggles between the political and religious elite over the vacancy of the post of Grand Imam at the renowned Al-Azhar University – and none of the country’s major institutions come off well, including the secret services.
The best actor was the Korean Song Kang Ho, who played the leading role in the Cannes star hour “Parasite” three years ago and now in Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s “Broker” embodies a man who gets newborns from baby hatches and sells them – and in the In the course of which a lot of difficult moral questions are encountered.
Jury Prize and Grand Prix were shared
The Jury Prize went to “Le Otto Montage”, a film about the beauty of the Tyrolean mountains, their threat to modernity and the loss of home – and, in equal parts, to “Eo” by 84-year-old Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski , probably the most controversial film in the competition, which depicts the life of a donkey entirely through its eyes. At the Palais du Festival, Skolimowski thanked not the usual staff but his donkeys. A total of six Sardinian animals shared the role, and their names should be mentioned as the main actors: Tako, Pola, Marieta, Piccolino, Rocco and Mela. People play practically no role in the film.
The festival’s special anniversary award (only Cannes could come up with this idea) went to brothers Jean-Luc and Luc Dardenne, who have won the Palme d’Or twice before (for “Rosetta” and “L’Enfant”), their most recent competition film “Tori et Lokita” was only a poor copy of their best works.
Park Chan-wook won the Grand Prix in Cannes in 2004 with “Old Boy” and the Jury Prize in 2011 for “Durst”; For his elegant and innovative romantic detective thriller “Decision to Leave” he now deservedly won the Best Director award.
As with the Jury Prize, the Grand Prix was split, indicating a jury disagreement. It went to Lukas Dhont’s Close, a touchy-feely film about a boy’s friendship brought to a tragic end by social pressure – and to Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon, the film adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novel of the same name about opaque Anglo-Americans who spin their schemes in the Latin American backyard. Nobody expected Denis.