Justine Triet wins the Cannes Palme d’Or with “Anatomie d’une chute”

2023-05-27 21:36:24

It was one of the great favorites and it hasn’t failed. French director Justine Triet has won the Cannes Palme d’Or for the legal thriller “Anatomy of a Fall”, which excited international critics from the first day it was screened. The film methodically explains the investigation and trial of the death of a man in strange circumstances in a chalet in the French mountains. Triet makes history by becoming the third female director to win the festival’s highest award, after Jane Campion for “The Piano” (1993) and Julia Ducournau for “Titane” (2021). It is the eleventh time in history that a French film has won the Palme d’Or.

For his part, the British director Jonathan Glazer has taken home the second most important prize, the Grand Prix, for his shocking “The zone of interest”, in which he dissects from a completely original perspective, adapting the novel by Martin Amis, the machinery of the Holocaust in the Auschwitz camp. A daring film, which plays permanently with the off-field and with an exceptional soundtrack by Mica Levi. The Thai filmmaker Tran Anh Hung was one of the surprises of the night, awarded with the prize for best director for the French-Thai co-production “La passion de Dodin Bouffant”, the culinary film starring Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel.

As for the acting awardsin the men’s category, the great favorite, the Japanese Koji Yakusho, has prevailed, protagonist of “Perfect days”, by the German Wim Wenders, in which he interprets in a methodical and very human way a person in charge of cleaning the public toilets in Tokyo. In the female categorythe winner was Turkish actress Merve Dizdar, awarded for her portrayal of a primary school teacher in “Les herbes sèches” by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Dizdar has ousted the great favourite, the German Sandra Huller, harmed because the two films in which she starred, “The zone of interest” and “Anatomy of a chute”, have been awarded major prizes, incompatible with that of interpretation

Of the rest of awards highlight the prize for the best screenplay obtained by Yuji Sakamoto for “Monster”, the film by the Japanese Hirokazu Kore-eda, who collected and thanked the award in the absence of its screenwriter. The jury prize went to the Finnish Aki Kaurismaki for “Les feuilles mortes”, which was one of the big favorites at the Palme d’Or. Perhaps for this reason, the Finnish director did not appear at the closing ceremony to collect his award. Among the films best rated by critics, the most forgotten were “La chimera”, by Alice Rohrwacher, “May December”, by Todd Haynes and “Il sol dell’avvenire” by Nanni Moretti.