Cannes 2024: when the jury thwarts the predictions!

The Palme that we thought was promised to Mohammad Rasoulof came to consecrate Anora, the supercharged comedy by Sean Baker along with a prize list reflecting the jury's desire to vary the pleasures.

Since Friday evening, the race for the Palme seemed to be over. Beyond the political significance of the gesture, Wild fig tree seeds by the Iranian Mohammad Rasoulof – in forced exile from his country which he left clandestinely to avoid spending the next 8 years of his life in prison – established itself through its cinematic power as THE major film of this 2024 edition, coming shake up the duel which seemed to oppose the two most exciting works up until then: Anora by Sean Baker and Emilia Perez by Jacques Audiard.

But now, Greta Gerwig's jury decided otherwise. A gesture of self-centered pride so as not to let a (too) announced victory be dictated to you? Possible obviously, but the reward awarded to him – a special jury prize, added to the list of rewards distributed each year – suggests another hypothesis. The basic one of tastes and colors: the fact that the majority of them may simply not have liked the film but wanted to underline the courage of its author with an accessit.

Tastes and colors therefore. But also a strong choice which will be contested by some. In a festival which has often seen films triumph through and for their subject, choosing a comedy, favoring laughter over tears, has something daring, even kamikaze in the place of author-king cinema. It is also a great service to the festival by reminding us that basically all genres have the right to be included (and to be awarded prizes) in the Cannes competition. Because this desire to vary the pleasures is found in the entire list where a musical comedy in the world of Mexican drug traffickers rubs shoulders (Emilia Perez who, with two prizes, including that for her female performers, appears to be the other big winner of the evening), a body horror doped with hemoglobin (The Substance by Coralie Fargeat for a surprising prize for the screenplay which is not spontaneously what one would designate as its major quality), the sensory portrait of two Indian women in search of love (All we imagine as light), a crazy actor in a head-smacking film (Jesse Plemons in Kinds of Kindness by Yorgos Lanthimos) in a festival surprisingly poor in great performances by male performers (where the battle raged among the women) and even the inevitable sharp arthouse film, here bordering on caricature in its poseur pretension (Great tour by Miguel Gomes).

Yes, there was something for everyone. Well almost. The most anticipated film of this 2024 edition (the Megalopolis by Coppola) and more broadly the filmmakers who had their napkin ring at Cannes (David Cronenberg, Paolo Sorrentino, Jia Zhang Ke, Christophe Honoré, Michel Hazanavicius, Andrea Arnold, etc.) left empty-handed. Carried away by a wind of renewal therefore, with the exception of the unsinkable Jacques Audiard rewarded once a decade since the 90s,

It will also be noted that Anora offers its first prize in American cinema since… 2011 and Tree of Life by Terrence Malick, rewarded like this year by an American jury president (Robert de Niro at the time). As was the case for the previous one, Fahrenheit 9/11 favorite to favorite old boy by Quentin Tarantino's jury. Is this THE condition to see Uncle Sam's country win the Grail? Jean Labadie (who will also distribute the Megalopolis de Coppola), he does not know this problem. At the head of the Pact, he obtained his 12th Palme d'Or and his second in a row after Anatomy of a fall. A distributor without partisanship and sensitive to all types of cinema, he could ultimately only triumph in this list which loudly claims the same open-mindedness.

Cannes 2024: the Premiere winners