Austrian director wins Cannes top prize for second time in three years for tender portrait of ailing elderly couple
Michael Haneke's latest movie, Amour, won the Austrian director his second top prize from Cannes in three years, following his triumph in 2009 with The White Ribbon. The film is the tenderest in a career defined by unflinching brutality, as well as arguably the least cinematic: a two-hander set in a Paris flat. Haneke joined just five others to have won the Palme d'Or twice, including Francis Ford Coppola and Emir Kusturica.
Amour, which stars Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva as an elderly couple struggling to cope after one of them suffers a series of strokes, won universal praise on its premiere at the 65th annual festival last week, and its win was widely thought to be something of a certainty. But elsewhere there were shocks galore from Nanni Moretti's jury, whose members include Ewan MacGregor, Andrea Arnold and Alexander Payne.
The Grand Prix (widely perceived as the runners-up award) went to Reality, Matteo Garrone's satire on reality TV, which met with a far more muted reception from critics than Gomorrah, his mafia hit from 2008.
But there was much applause for Ken Loach, another surprise victor, this year of the Jury Prize (which ranks just below the Palme d'Or and the Grand Prix). Loach, whose The Wind that Shakes the Barley won the Palme in 2006, used his speech to send out a message of solidarity to those adversely affected by austerity and privatisation.
His film, The Angels' Share, a larky whisky heist, was screened with English as well as French subtitles at the festival, lest the Glaswegian accents prove a barrier for non-Scots.
The film made headlines after revelations about its newcomer lead's stint in prison, and after Loach berated the British Board of Film Classification over what he considered their squeamishness over the use of the c-word.
Three awards were lavished on Beyond the Hills, a Romanian nun melodrama that polarised the press: best screenplay for Cristian Mungiu, whose abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won the Palme d'Or in 2007, plus joint best actress awards for its leads.
Mexican auteur Carlos Reygadas picked up the coveted best director award for Post Tenebras Lux, an experimental drama about a couple on a high-end sex holiday, whose children experience strange dreams.
There was little love for other English language cinema at the festival, including The Paperboy, Lee Daniels's noirish follow-up to Precious, starring an oft nude Nicole Kidman as an unstable woman who has an affair with Zac Efron. On the Road, Walter Salles's adaptation of the Jack Kerouac novel starring Kristen Stewart, walked away empty-handed, as did Cosmopolis, the David Cronenberg film featuring Stewart's Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson.
Following last year's high-profile expulsion of the Danish director Lars von Trier after a series of jocular remarks about Adolf Hitler in a press conference to promote his film, Melancholia, this year's festival was a relatively mild fortnight of genuflection to returning auteurs, concretised by a set of awards which, for all their off-kilter curios, still honoured two men in the 70s (Loach is 75; Haneke 70).
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/may/27/cannes-palme-haneke-amour
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