The Cannes Palme d’Or has been given to a gorgeous film which instantly beguiled everyone who saw it, and it became the talking point at the festival for days.
Korean film-maker Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a gripping satirical parable of class, status and injustice — an invasion of the lifestyle snatchers that was widely compared to the Joseph Losey classic The Servant.
It is a handsomely made film, which runs as smoothly as a luxury car. I myself found myself thinking that I liked it a fraction less than Bong’s other films, and other films in this Competition, but there is no doubt that it is an outstanding film.
It is truly excellent to see Mati Diop get the Grand Prix — the silver medal of the Cannes prizes — for her passionate, poetic and genre-challenging movie Atlantique, which takes the issue of migrants, poverty and capitalism and makes of it a film which encompasses supernatural mystery as well realist anger. What boldness and flair Diop shows here, the promise of a great career ahead.
The screenplay award to Céline Sciamma for her wonderful movie Portrait of a Lady on Fire is refreshing, and it is indeed terrifically well written, though it must disappoint those of us who were hoping and predicting that she would win the Palme for this arresting drama, about a young aristocrat (Adele Haenel) who is having her portrait painted without her knowing it by an artist (Noémie Merlant) with whom she begins to fall in love.
What a fantastic night for Emily Beecham — whom we last saw in the somewhat Fleabag-ish film Daphne — as she gets the best actress award for her performance in Jessica Hausner’s strange futurist chiller Little Joe, about a plant-breeding scientist who develops a new flower whose scent will make human beings happy.
There is something deeply satisfying in seeing the best actor prize go to Antonio Banderas, playing a version of Pedro Almodóvar, in Almodóvar’s exquisitely sensuous and intelligent film Pain and Glory, a film which sports with the distinctions between fantasy and memory, fact and fiction. Banderas is playing a character rather older than he is: a troubled film-maker — older, fragile and in fact on the verge of utter decrepitude. But obviously there is a more vigorous, vital person and creative artist inside, waiting to be inspired to come out. Banderas conveys the dichotomy very well: he is such a charismatic screen presence.
Giving the directing prize to the Dardennes brothers for their middling Young Ahmed feels to me like a diplomatic concession to their existing status, a bit of horse-trading among the jury.
Inevitably, the snubs are there: nothing for Ken Loach’s barnstorming Sorry We Missed You (with its great script by Paul Laverty). Maybe the jury felt that the double-Palmed Loach had been rewarded enough — though it didn’t stop them garlanding the Dardennes’ film — or maybe they just didn’t like it.
And I’m frankly astonished that there was nothing for Quentin Tarantino’s dazzling and brilliant Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, which was such a thrilling movie.
So often festival juries get things wrong, but this is not one of those years. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a brilliant film: a serious film, but also an entertainment and a family comedy whose black-comic juices drip from the screen. I’m looking forward to seeing it again.
