No Berlin-style fracas, but at Cannes, the politics were on screen and off

The Cannes Film Festival has ended with its top prize, the Palme D’Or, going to Norwegian film Fjord, a tale about political polarisation directed by Romanian Cristian Mungiu.

Well received but not on the top of anyone’s prediction list, the film winning provided a fittingly subdued ending to a festival where attendance was down, must-see premieres few, and traces of Babylonian excess hard to find.

Fjord was one of the festival’s few star vehicles, with Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a fundamentalist Christian couple whose children are taken away by Norwegian authorities after Stan’s paterfamilias, a Romanian immigrant, is reported for smacking his daughter. Based on a real-life case, it highlights the tensions that arise around different groups’ values within societies that believe themselves to be inclusive, especially of immigrants.

Though not all critics were convinced, Fjord was scarcely a winner from left field, given that Mungiu won the Palme D’Or in 2008 for the strikingly original Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, which put the newly resurgent Romanian cinema on the map.

Its victory nonetheless came over some formidable frontrunners, including Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, which shared the best director award with Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi for La Bola Negra, and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, winner of the Grand Prix.

The jury, led by Korean director Park Chan-wook, did its best to ensure all the favourites came away with some kind of award. All of a Sudden, the much-loved new film from Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, won the best actress award for its two ebullient leads, Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, who play respectively a progressive nursing home director and a visiting Japanese theatre director dying of cancer.

The best actor award was also shared, by Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne who play a couple in Belgian director Lukas Dhont’s Coward.

Set in the trenches of World War I, Coward was one of many festival films revolving around romances between young men. This trend wasn’t confined to the official program either: the biggest, buzziest sale in the market was the $US17 million reportedly paid by A24 for the modestly budgeted feelgood film Club Kid, about a drug-happy New York club impresario forced to look after a tweenage son he never knew he had.

Queer stories were everywhere, from the lurid lesbian schlock of Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death in Camp Miasma to the jury prize winner in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, Elephants in the Fog. This lovely slice of outsider life was truly out of the blue, set among a socially sanctioned transsexual cult in Nepal. This year was, according to the director of the Queer Palm award, the gayest Cannes ever.

Another prominent cluster of films drew on the French experience of World War II, particularly the shame that still surrounds Vichy France and its collaboration with the Nazis. The competition’s screenplay award went to Emmanuel Marre for A Man of His Time, a long and sombre examination of a lesser functionary’s moral disintegration within the bureaucracy of the Vichy regime in southern France. The subtle provocations of Marre’s lengthy text – brought to life in Swann Arlaud’s performance, which had been widely expected to carry off the acting prize – were in vivid contrast to the swashbuckling heroics of Antonin Baudry’s Bataille de Gaulle, in which Charles De Gaulle’s transition from an absurd figure holding out against history to the beating heart of the Free French is related with relish.

Laszlo Nemes, whose memorable first film Son of Saul (2015) was set in a concentration camp, turned his attention in competition film Moulin to the heroism of Resistance leader Jean Moulin. Moulin is also a pivotal character in Bataille De Gaulle; seeing the same events from different points of view in one festival made for a rich experience.

Best of all, showing outside competition in the Cannes Premiere program, was When the Night Falls, written and directed by revered actor Daniel Auteuil, about a group of priests and welfare workers working under the Vichy regime who rescue several hundred children from execution in the death camps. All these stories, in different ways and despite the passage of more than 80 years since the events they describe, had the ring of urgency.

That urgency felt very much of the times. After a clash of views on the role of politics in film and festivals nearly tore apart the Berlinale in February, there was an expectation that Cannes could similarly erupt. The tinder was certainly there: British scriptwriter Paul Laverty reiterated his support for Palestine in the first jury conference, while actor Javier Bardem, in a press conference for Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved, made world headlines with his declaration that Gaza was suffering genocide and it was his responsibility to use this platform to oppose it.

The moment passed without catching alight, however. There were no repercussions after Bardem’s straight talk, or soul-searching of the kind that ravaged Berlin. Nor were there any demonstrations of the kind regularly seen during the festival, possibly because Cannes is now under the control of a right-wing conservative mayor whose most recent contribution to film culture was to rename one of the town’s famous beaches after anti-immigrant activist Brigitte Bardot.

Inside the cinemas, on the other hand, there was a round of defiant boos whenever the logo for Canal Plus – a television network that invests heavily in film – appeared on screen. Before the festival, 600 artists and technicians signed an open letter protesting against the increasing editorial control of owner Vincent Bollore, a vigorous supporter of various proto-Fascist fringe parties. Over the course of the festival, the letter’s signatories rose to 3800, including prominent stars such as Juliette Binoche and Mark Ruffalo, while public anxiety about Bollore’s power is growing.

A buzz of boos will not bring the corporation to its knees, but it did bring the fight to the beating heart of cinema.

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