Perhaps that was to be expected. One of the worst-thought-out juries of recent years has produced an ambiguously ecumenical and falsely modern verdict. «Titane», the Palme d’Or, is not the novelty that many have wanted to see: Cronenberg but also Lynch and even the forgotten (from the awards) Verhoeven have done better and earlier. And as for “fluidity” and “gender”, the film does not put itself at their service but rather uses them to gratify that audience that Virginia Woolf defined as middlebrow, ready to follow trends without really confronting them. Patience, this is not the first time that time will do justice to a wrong verdict.
Let’s console ourselves instead with the double Grand Prix which awarded two of the most interesting (and really new) works of the Festival, «A hero» by Asghar Farhadi and «Compartimento n. 6 »by Juho Kuosmanen, even if the proliferation of ex aequo (there was also the jury prize divided between the Israeli Lapid and the Thai Weerasethakul) seems the sign of a certain confusion. The same one that Spike Lee showed during the award ceremony but also that won an all-directed film, “Drive My Car”, for the screenplay. Well …
Beyond the controversies, however, and the curious exclusions (a black president did not want to reward any white compatriot: is it just a coincidence? Just as four French members only got the jury prize for France, which the interested party did not even withdraw) beyond the many doubts about a selection plethoric (and a very questionable health protection) the mutation of the Cannes Film Festival must be underlined, increasingly at the service of the market and its interests. The times of discoveries are very far away, now the red carpet has become a catwalk for the commercial release of films, just as it has not escaped some attentive observers that a film like “Titane” in competition was in fact a hand extended to that part of the industry that wants to launch itself into the production of auteur films, a provocative oxymoron behind which only the idea of a fashionable cinema is hidden. Middlebrow, in fact.
July 17, 2021 (change July 17, 2021 | 22:40)
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