The Square bags Palme d’Or

Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s The Square, a satire on the contemporary art world and what it reveals about modern society, took home the Palme d’Or, as the Cannes Film Festival rounded off its 70th edition on Sunday night. The Square is the first Swedish film to win the coveted prize in 66 years. 

Ostlund — whose breakout feature, Force Majeure, garnered the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize here in 2014 — is only the second Swedish director after Alf Sjoberg to win the Palme d’Or. Sjoberg won in 1951 for a screen adaptation of the August Strindberg play Miss Julie. 

The 2017 Palme d’Or was announced by Spanish filmmaker and jury president Pedro Almodovar and presented to Ostlund, a Cannes competition first-timer, by French actress Juliette Binoche at a glittering closing ceremony in the festival’s main screening venue Grand Theatre Lumiere.

Winning note

Three Hollywood actors — Nicole Kidman, Diane Kruger and Joaquin Phoenix — won accolades on the closing night of the world’s biggest film festival. The Grand Prix, the prize for the second best film in a 19-film competition lineup, went to French director Robin Campillo’s 120 Battements Par Minute (BPM – Beats Per Minute), a perceptive and affecting drama about Parisian AIDS activists of the early 1990s. The Moroccan-born Campillo was co-screenwriter of the 2008 Palme d’Or winner, The Class, directed by Laurent Cantet.

Sofia Coppola bagged the Best Director Prize for The Beguiled, a feminist retelling of the 1971 Clint Eastwood-starrer about a wounded Union soldier forced to take refuge in an all-girls seminary in Virginia during the Civil War.

One of the frontrunners in the Palme d’Or race, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Nelyubov (Loveless), an unflinchingly acidic portrait of urban Russia hinging on an estranged couple and their missing son, had to settle for a Jury Prize. This was in a way a repeat of the fate that Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan met in 2014, when it lost out to Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep and had to be content with the Best Screenplay award.

This year’s Best Screenplay nod was received jointly by the writers of The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Fillipou) and You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay).

In the act

The acting prizes of the 70th Cannes Film Festival — three were handed out in all — were cornered by big-name stars working in American cinema. Nicole Kidman, who had four films in the official selection this year, including two in Competition, won the 70th Anniversary Award.

Notably, both of Kidman’s competition entries (The Beguiled and The Killing of a Sacred Deer) figured on the awards roster drawn up by Almodovar’s nine-member jury, made up of three other feted directors — Paolo Sorrentino, Park Chan-wook and Maren Ade — besides actors Will Smith, Jessica Chastain, Fan Bingbing and Agnes Jaoui, and music composer Gabriel Yared.

Phoenix won the prize for the best performance by an actor in Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s neo-noir thriller You Were Never Really Here.

German-American Diane Kruger won the best actress prize for her nuanced performance as a Hamburg woman who loses her Turkish husband and six-year-old son in a bomb blast triggered by neo-Nazis in Fatih Akin’s In the Fade. The Camera d’Or prize went to Leonor Serraille’s free-flowing character-driven Jeune Femme (Montparnasse Bienvenue), which played in Un Certain Regard. — PTI

Award time

• Ruben Ostlund, The Square — Palme d’Or
• Sofia Coppola, The Beguiled — Best Director 
• Nicole Kidman — 70th Anniversary Award
• Diane Kruger, In the Fade — Best Actress 
• Joaquin Phoenix, You Were Never Really Here — Best Actor