PORTRAIT – Five years after his Palme d’Or for The Squarethe Swedish director once again won the Grail for Without filterirresistible satire on the background of the class struggle.
Thierry Frémaux must have spread laughing gas in the deliberation room. President Vincent Lindon and the members of his jury, Asghar Farhadi, Jasmine Trinca, Ladj Ly, Noomi Rapace, Joachim Trier or even Jeff Nichols, are artists of great value but they are not renowned for their sense of humor. Yet they covered with gold Without filter, by Ruben Östlund, the only comedy in the competition. A real one, punctuated with bursts of liberating laughter.
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Five after his Palme d’Or for The Square , a vitriolic satire of contemporary art and political correctness, the 48-year-old Swedish director once again leaves Cannes with the supreme award. He joined the very closed club of double gold palms: Coppola, Imamura, August, Kusturica, Loach, Haneke and the Dardenne brothers (won a special prize this year for Tori and Lokita ).
Revealed at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section in 2014 with Snow Therapy (a father on vacation in Les Arcs takes to his heels as an avalanche approaches, abandoning his wife and children), the Swede confirms with Without filter a sense of ruthless observation and a talent for portrait painting. He hardly spares the emptiness and vanity of his contemporaries, the failings of the time in general and of the Western male in particular.
A few days away from receiving his second prize, in a hotel in Cannes, Östlund told us about the source of inspiration for Without filter. “My wife is a fashion photographer. She told me the story of one of her model friends. He was a mechanic before being spotted on the street. Two years later, he was one of the highest paid male models in the world thanks to a campaign for Calvin Klein perfume. He started going bald. His agent then advised him to find a famous girlfriend to revive himself. To fall in love ? We laughed at him. I was inspired by it to create the characters of Carl and Yaya in Without filter.
Carl and Yaya, young and pretty models and influencers, embark on a yacht populated by great fortunes (Russian industrialist, British arms dealer, Tech billionaire). Cruising is not easy. The rich take dearly, but the poor (the ship’s employees) are not the pure-hearted oppressed. Woody Harrelson, he plays a Marxist and alcoholic captain, reluctant to leave his cabin to meet the passengers. Stranded on an island, a handful of survivors then replay the class struggle by fighting over the last pretzels.
Östlund, admirer of Michael Haneke and Michel Houellebecq, two great comedians and humanists in his eyes, signs a farce on capitalism that is a little long (he can still cut) but exhilarating. We can’t wait to see his next feature film, still in the planning stages. After the sea, the air. “It will take place on a plane, during a long-haul flight, explains the director. It will be titled: The Entertainment system is down. The crew announces a failure of the screens. Passengers will have to occupy themselves for fifteen hours without entertainment. The film begins at the end: the plane crashes and everyone dies. The spectator knows that all the passengers will die before seeing them get upset because the screens don’t work. The passengers really freak out when they are given a bottle of mineral water and a sandwich in compensation. I already have plenty of other ideas. » We don’t know if this new film will allow him to win a third Palme d’Or, but if so, he will be the only member of a club that does not yet exist. That of the triple palms.