![]() Leos Carax has found getting movies made such a personal trial in recent years that it is pleasing, in a way, to see the best director prize go to him for the uproarious, tonally ambiguous musical Annette, composed by Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks and starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard as the bad-boy comedian and refined opera singer who have a child together: the troubled girl singer of the title. Photograph: John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images (I think he should have got best actor.) I loved Compartment No 6, and its unexpected success tonight was one of the evening’s real pleasures: a love story aboard a train, with a touch of the French New Wave, as a Finnish archaeology student gradually falls for a tough, boorish Russian guy who has a heart of gold. It has understated, excellent performance from Amir Jadidi as the self-pitying anti-hero himself. It’s an intriguing high concept, though I wondered about something rather forced and contrived in some of the plot transitions. This latter film was hugely admired here in Cannes with many tipping it for the big prize: the complex, subtle story of a man imprisoned for debt who thinks he can get out of his jail sentence by paying off his creditor by secretly selling the gold coins that his girlfriend has found by a bus-stop – and then when that looks tricky, muddles his way towards another idea: pretending to be a hero of honesty and returning them to their owner. The second prize was split between two films: the Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen’s Compartment No 6 and Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero. I have to be honest and say that I still found something a little bit silly and pointless in Titane, but it is obviously the work of a supremely talented film-maker who calculates her effects with masterly precision, and we are seeing the beginnings of a great career. Titane could well come to be savoured as a cult classic to rival Eraserhead, although perhaps being turned down for the Palme d’Or would have done just as much for that elevation. ![]() Making a living as a dancer, she takes extreme retributive action against a creepy, abusive male fan and goes on the run disguised as a boy, where she finally falls under the unexpectedly tender protection of fire chief Vincent (played by grizzled, rumpled French cinema veteran Vincent Lindon).īut she’s also had transgressive Ballardo-Cronenbergian sex with a vintage Cadillac, leaving her pregnant with an anthro-automotive hybrid devil child. Newcomer Agathe Rouselle gave it everything she had - which was a heck of a lot - as Alexia, a young woman who has grown up with a titanium steel plate in her head, after surviving a car crash in childhood caused by her useless dad. ‘Titane put its steel toe-capped boot through the origami flower of received wisdom’. ![]() And there’s something refreshing in that. Tonight Titane put its steel toe-capped boot through the origami flower of received wisdom. But I’m an enormous fan of challenging the consensus and overturning the tyranny of anaemic good taste, and perhaps there’s something in the perennial stateliness of cinéma that cries out to be trolled, a bit. I must admit I was not a fan of Titane, being in my view not the best movie in competition, and not the best film that Ducournau has directed - being less interesting than her first film, the more complex and more shocking Raw. It’s the biggest épat since Lars Von Trier won it for Dancer in the Dark - and, importantly, it’s an award that makes Julie Ducournau only the second female Palme-winner in the festival’s history, since Jane Campion. Cannes let rip a punk power chord of glorious mischief by giving the Palme d’Or to Julie Ducournau’s gonzo genderqueer body-horror shocker Titane, and the jury and the movie’s many fans will have savoured the delicious applecart-upsetting thrill of it all.
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