The jury at Cannes seems to have made a rather surprising choice for the Palme d’Or this year – French filmmaker Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan, a film about a family of Sri Lankan refugees in Paris. Featuring debutants Antonythasan Jesuthasan and Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Dheepan is mostly in Tamil and drew a rather lukewarm response from viewers and critics. And the sense of disappointment at it being voted for the top prize on Sunday night was evident as the award was greeted with “a mixture of boos, shrugs and applause from the international press corps who were watching the ceremony at the Palais”, writes Justin Chang in Variety.com.
Most critics were in agreement that Dheepan was much less deserving than the filmmaker’s earlier works like A Prophet and Rust and Bone. “Just as last year, the jury gave its ultimate acclaim to a brilliant director who has accumulated an overwhelmingly deserving reputation but had actually given us something less than his very best work… I am baffled”, writes Peter Bradshaw in TheGuardian.com.
But obviously the jury thought otherwise, “This isn’t a jury of film critics. This is a jury of artists looking at the work”, said jury co-president Joel Coen at a news conference after the awards ceremony.
Eric Kohn of Indiewire.com opines that, “…the Audiard movie hardly deserved the top prize in a year when far more daring accomplishments stood out”. Kohn feels The Assassin, The Lobster and Son of Saul are some of the films that made a mark this year.
While saying that we should have known to expect the unexpected from the Coens, Jon Frosch writing in TheHollywoodReporter.com adds that “Coming just months after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the decision to give the top prize to a film about people of color struggling to integrate in a France rife with tensions was in many ways a timely one.”
However Kohn best sums up the prevalent sentiment in his write-up while rooting for Laszlo Nemes’ “powerfully engaging” Son of Saul:
While “Son of Saul” lost the Palme, it still deserves to define the essential value of Cannes, a festival that thrives on its tensions with the rest of the world.
…But for Cannes to remain relevant, it must herald the new. Son of Saul, a genuine discovery on several fronts, illustrates the potential for cinema to push its linguistic and interpretative boundaries into new arenas.
– Eric Kohn, IndieWire.com
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