Cannes Proved Its Own Value With This Year’s Palme d’Or Winner

Nothing can stop the Cannes Film Festival, not even a suspected act of sabotage. The morning of the fest’s last day, a major outage took out power across southeastern France, including the town of Cannes. Traffic lights went out, stores went dark, and hungry tourists and attendees who hadn’t withdrawn cash were left thwarted in their attempts to buy breakfast because the ATMs were down and no place could process card payments. I was in a screening of Oliver Laxe’s rave survival thriller Sirât when, just at the start of its last act, the sound cut out, and then the screen went dark. The crowd, in typical Cannes fashion, hooted and hollered, but just ten minutes later, the movie had started up again. The Palais des Festivals swapped to an independent power source, and the show — including the last of the screenings, press conferences, photocalls, and the closing ceremony that evening — went on.

Lots of furious speculation about which title will take the Palme d’Or, the coveted top prize, takes place over the fest’s 12 days, but to actually guess, you’d have to be able to see into the minds and the interactions of the jury tasked with awarding it. This year, the group was headed up by Juliette Binoche, presiding over actors Halle Berry, Alba Rohrwacher, and Jeremy Strong, author Leila Slimani, and filmmakers Dieudo Hamadi, Payal Kapadia, Carlos Reygada, and Hong Sangsoo. They gathered on the stage of the Lumière while a series of luminaries, including Cate Blanchett, The Substance director Coralie Fargeat, Almodóvar muse Rossy de Palma, and an impressively décollataged Da’Vine Joy Randolph, traipsed up to the podium to present the awards. The 87-year-old Claude Lelouch made an appearance, as did John C. Reilly, who, fully committed to his Mister Romantic neo-vaudeville era, was joined by a surprise guitarist for a rendition of “La Vie en rose” that appeared to mostly bemuse the crowd.

Overall, the mood was celebratory, grateful, and a little sentimental, as you might expect from a group of exhausted people who’ve just spent almost two weeks watching movies from around the world, taking in the sunshine, and drinking champagne (which was what The Secret Agent’s Kleber Mendonça Filho claimed he was doing when he was late to the stage to accept the prize for Best Director). There was talk of the power of cinema, the theatrical experience, and Cannes itself to bring people together. “I believe in international cinema as a language, an alternative language of unification,” Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier, whose Sentimental Value was a massive audience favorite, said in his acceptance speech for the second place Grand Prix. The startlingly handsome Laxe, whose nihilistic banger of a film shared the third place Jury Prize with another early standout, Sound of Falling, shared a story about the possible histories of his own mixed background to a cab driver. (The actor-director is Spanish, was born in France, and is of Galician ancestry.) The driver responded with a saying: “We made you from different tribes in order for you to know each other.”

“I applaud the festival’s understanding that cinema creates openings for wider social conversations to take place,” Blanchett said before presenting the Palme. “Here, these dialogues are encouraged to take root where otherwise they risk being hijacked by the self-serving world of national and personal political ambition.” Is Cannes a sanctuary, or is it a willful bubble? Despite all the cinematic utopianism on display, it can be hard to say. Certainly, the most pointed remark during the ceremony pointed to the latter. Palestinian actor and filmmaker Tawfeek Barhom, who won the short film prize for his I’m Glad You’re Dead Now, finished his speech by paraphrasing Jesse Welles “War Isn’t Murder”: “20 years from now, when visiting the Gaza Strip, try not to think about the dead, and have a nice trip.” And yet, it’s hard to be cynical when the final prize was given to Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who slumped down in his seat for a long minute in astonishment and joy before going on stage to accept for his film A Simple Accident.

It was a wonder to see Panahi, in sunglasses and overwhelmed, in person at all. Convicted of “propaganda against the Islamic Republic,” he was banned from making movies, which he nevertheless continued to do, and from leaving Iran, a ruling he abided by for 15 years. His work traveled without him in that time, premiering and winning prizes and plaudits at festivals like Berlin and Cannes while he remained at home. Jailed in 2010, he was imprisoned again around the time that his last film, No Bears, debuted at Venice in 2022. But, after a new court ruling in his favor, all sentences against him have been lifted, rendering him able to travel and officially able to work again, though he shot A Simple Accident as he’s made all his recent movies — secretly and without government approval. And if there’s any film that fits the impossibly idealist version of Cannes its participants reach for every year, it’s this one.

An incredibly dark comedy of errors, A Simple Accident is centered on a man named Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) who becomes convinced that a customer at the garage where he works is the intelligence agent who questioned and tortured him when he was in prison. He, like the man he and other detainees nicknamed “Peg Leg,” has a prosthetic limb, and a voice that Vahid is sure he recognizes. The rub is that Vahid was always blindfolded during his encounters with Peg Leg, so after he kidnaps and prepares to murder the man, he starts to have doubts, gradually accruing a whole vanful of distressed, furious, and mournful fellow victims, one of them a bride on the eve of her wedding day, none of whom can agree on what to do next. It’s about grappling with how to live with having been harmed on such a profound level, and about whether anything — violence, remorse, retaliation — can ever provide the closure its characters long for. It’s a deeply angry but also ruefully human movie. It’s also a means for its author to delve into his own mistreatment at the hands of the Iranian government, and any festival that has the sense to give it an award is demonstrating its own value. It was a good choice, for a very good year at Cannes — an event that no one should attempt to stop.