During a news conference after last year’s Cannes Film Festival awards ceremony, Joel Coen, co-president of the jury, responded to a question about why the Palme d’Or had gone to Jacques Audiard’s tepidly received “Dheepan,” rather than one of the more acclaimed films in competition. Coen’s response was characteristically blunt: “This isn’t a jury of film critics.”
Indeed. And setting aside my own obvious bias in the matter, I can say that this arrangement is — in theory, and in sometimes in practice — a good thing. We critics are often accused, sometimes rightly, of approaching our chosen art form with harsh scowls and highfalutin criteria at the ready, our judgments reflecting a profound detachment from the experience of the general audience, as well as of the artists who work hard to entertain them. At the same time, I would counter that Cannes, the greatest film festival in the world, has a mandate to honor the best in world cinema, which at times means pushing back against popular expectations.
There’s also the fact that anyone who serves on a festival jury is, by definition, exercising critical judgment and making an assertion of personal taste. Some of the most satisfying Palme d’Or winners in recent memory — “Amour,” “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” “The Tree of Life,” and even a “difficult” work like “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” — have demonstrated that it’s possible for non-card-carrying critics to make smart, aesthetically adventurous decisions. They've also demonstrated that honoring the art form and satisfying an audience are not mutually exclusive goals.
There were a number of films in this year’s competition that managed to do both, perhaps none more brilliantly than “Toni Erdmann,” an alternately piercing and side-splitting dramedy from the German director Maren Ade, which premiered to rapturous acclaim early on and led the critics’ polls to the very end. Close behind was “Paterson,” Jim Jarmusch's exquisitely wrought portrait of the poet as a young city-bus driver (played by — wait for it — Adam Driver), which emerged as an immediate and unexpected high point in the American indie darling’s career. And the competition ended on a strong note with Paul Verhoeven’s supremely sinuous “Elle,” starring Isabelle Huppert in a career-crowning performance as a woman who turns the tables not only on her rapist, but on the entire troubling subgenre of rape-revenge thrillers.
None of these films won a thing. Instead the jury, led by the Australian director George Miller, awarded the Palme d’Or to Ken Loach’s “I, Daniel Blake,” an appreciably passionate, sometimes stirring yet excessively contrived and self-congratulatory drama about the ravages of poverty and unemployment in the U.K. It’s a film that many in Cannes liked more than I did, and which drew widespread praise from British critics in particular, who can surely attest to the authenticity of its harsh depiction of their welfare state. But in handing Loach his second Palme (he won the first in 2006 for “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”), Miller’s jury, deliberately or not, wound up favoring an angry, relevant message rather than a great work of cinema. Loach inadvertently seemed to confirm as much when he noted in his acceptance speech that film is “exciting, it’s fun, and as you’ve seen tonight, it’s also very important.”
Still, better for the Palme to have gone to Loach than to Quebec’s Xavier Dolan, the 27-year-old world-cinema enfant terrible who pretty much horrified the press audience by inexplicably winning the runner-up Grand Prix for “It’s Only the End of the World.” In my 11 years of attending Cannes I cannot recall a worse jury decision than this one. A badly shot, shrilly performed and all-around excruciatingly misjudged dysfunctional-family torture session that felt far longer than its 97-minute running time, “World” was by far the least endurable film in competition (and that includes Sean Penn’s dreadful but dreadfully entertaining “The Last Face” ). Far inferior to the director's 2014 jury-prize winner, “Mommy,” the picture failed to win over even Dolan’s many fans, and I have counted myself among them on more than one occasion.
The jury did honor excellent films elsewhere. The decision to split the director award between Romania’s Cristian Mungiu and France’s Olivier Assayas was inspired; Mungiu’s “Graduation” is a tense, beautifully structured and richly expansive morality tale framed and acted with his usual precision, while Assayas’ “Personal Shopper,” an eccentric supernatural thriller starring Kristen Stewart as a medium, was one of the festival’s most successful and surprising experiments.
Frankly, handing Mungiu and Assayas the top two prizes would have made for a more satisfying outcome. Along similar lines, I had hoped that Andrea Arnold’s deeply enveloping road movie “American Honey” would garner something more than a jury prize — the third such honor she's won at Cannes (after 2006’s “Red Road” and 2009’s “Fish Tank”). Given the advance the new film represents in terms of scope, ambition and achievement, Arnold surely rated more than another third-place mention this time around.
I can’t begrudge the Iranian drama “The Salesman” its prizes for actor Shahab Hosseini and for writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s solid, well-carpentered screenplay. Nor can I dispute the effectiveness of the quietly stirring performance given by the Filipino actress Jaclyn Jose in Brillante Mendoza’s “Ma’ Rosa,” except to point out that it was chosen in a year with so many superb female performances — including Sandra Hüller in “Toni Erdmann,” Sonia Braga in “Aquarius,” Stewart in “Personal Shopper,” Ruth Negga in “Loving,” Huppert in “Elle” — that struck me as fuller, richer and more resonant achievements.
Asked about their decisions at Sunday’s news conference, Miller's jury responded with the kind of diplomatic evasiveness that past Cannes juries have showed before them: There were so many fine films, it was a difficult decision, you can’t please everyone, etc. My own sense, judging by their awards slate, is that they entered their deliberations with Ken Loach’s buzzword — “importance” — ringing in their ears. By and large, their taste ran toward tales that focused on economic disparity around the world (“I, Daniel Blake,” “Ma’ Rosa” and even “American Honey”), or that examined human corruption under oppressive societal circumstances (“Graduation,” “The Salesman”).
These are worthy causes to illuminate and, in some cases, worthy films as well. But after seeing all 21 movies in competition, I can attest that the 2016 Cannes Film Festival will not be remembered most for the films that trumpeted their importance (and self-importance) the loudest. It will be remembered for the gorgeous flurries of comedy and heartache in “Toni Erdmann,” which was acquired during the festival by Sony Pictures Classics and should put Maren Ade decisively on the international map. It will be remembered for the still but deep-running waters of “Paterson,” and for the high-wire interplay of terror, eroticism and provocation in “Elle” (and, for that matter, in Park Chan-wook’s highly entertaining “The Handmaiden” ).
Is there no room, in the recognition of cinematic excellence, for movies that don't wear their politics or morality on their sleeve — that touch less obvious, more nuanced chords? (Like, for example, the movies of George Miller?) That say a lot without raising a megaphone? That show that comedy is worth taking seriously? As Joel Coen noted, no, this is not a jury of film critics. But it should be a jury of artists with a less rigid, more sophisticated idea of what award-worthy cinema can and should be. And who can recognize a terrible Xavier Dolan movie when it’s staring them in the face.