‘Twas the night before cinephile Christmas… Film critics and fans from around the world, including Team Playlist, are heading to the south of France for the Cannes Film Festival, the world’s most prestigious celebration of the movies. The 69th festival kicks off tomorrow with the screening of Woody Allen’s “Cafe Society,” and George Miller’s jury will start getting a look at the 21 films in competition soon after that.
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In a little less than two weeks, this year’s jury will pick which of the line-up —one of the most exciting in years (read our festival preview for more on that)— will take the Palme d’Or, a prize as sought after as anything in the movie world. Everyone from Fellini, Bunuel and Antonioni to Tarantino, the Coens and Soderbergh have taken the Palme over the years, and it’s capable of putting a film on the radars of audiences worldwide.
To celebrate the start of Cannes tomorrow, we’ve been looking back at the recent history of the award: below, you’ll find a ranking of every Palme d’Or winner of the 21st century so far, from a bleak digital musical masterpiece to a gritty immigrant crime tale and everything in between. How did your favorite fare? Take a look and let us know how your own ranking would be in the comments.
16. “Fahrenheit 9/11” (2004)
In a year where Quentin Tarantino’s jury could have given the Palme to “Oldboy,” “The Motorcycle Diaries,” “2046,” Lucrecia Martel’s “The Holy Girl” or Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Tropic Malady,” among others, the pick of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” was immediately controversial, widely seen as a political statement against the War in Iraq (and in support of the filmmakers after the movie was publicly dumped by Disney weeks before its Cannes bow). Tarantino still defends the decision, and we might have done the same were we in his shoes, but to suggest that it won purely on creative merit is somewhat laughable. It’s not that “Fahrenheit 9/11” is bad —Moore’s movie, an attack on George W. Bush, his reaction to 9/11 and the then year-old war, has occasional moments of inspiration or revelation that can sit with anything in Moore’s filmography. But compared to its predecessor “Bowling For Columbine,” it’s unfocused, sloppily structured and occasionally sees its director and frontman become rather less appealing than he was at his best. It’s certainly an important and hugely successful film (it’s still the biggest-grossing documentary ever), but it’s a long, long way from being a great one.
15. “Elephant” (2003)
Cannes is undoubtedly rather clubby, and once you’re a favorite at the festival, you’re often a favorite there for life, with a Palme d’Or more or less ensuring you a competition slot whenever you like. At least that’s the explanation for how Gus Van Sant’s “Sea Of Trees,” a film so bad that it’s still gone unseen in the U.S. despite starring Oscar-winner Matthew McConaughey, came to compete at Cannes last year, twelve years after Van Sant won the top prize for “Elephant.” The film that won him the trophy —a quiet, spare look at a school shooting— is roughly a million times better than “Sea Of Trees,” but we have to admit that it’s also not a film that we’d class as a favorite either. Van Sant often feels like two directors trapped in one body —his sentimental mainstream side grappling with his austere, artful side— and “Elephant” is one of the purest expressions the director ever made of the latter. But underneath its remoteness and almost Haneke-ian quiet banality of violence, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Van Sant doesn’t really have anything to say about his subject. Clearly, Patrice Chéreau’s jury disagreed, giving it the top prize over “Kill Bill,” “Swimming Pool,” “The Barbarian Invasions” and “Dogville,” among others.
14. “Winter Sleep” (2014)
Less a film than an illustrated lecture, obviously the jury (and the many elated critics) found something in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s exceptionally talky relationship drama that we failed to. Largely a three-hander, the film details a winter spent holed up in a Cappadocian hotel, where the owner Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), his wife Nihal (Melissa Sozen) and his sister Necla (Demet Akbag) bicker, spar and pontificate at a rate the subtitles find hard to keep up with at times. The women exist as little more than foils for Aydin’s spoken-aloud internal monologue, and as even the most fraught exchanges begin to take on the form of highly premeditated, artificial and airless intellectualized debates, it’s difficult to escape the feeling that all three characters are simply mouthpieces for the same character. And that isn’t even local petty tyrant Aydin: it’s Ceylan. Numbing rather than provocative, despite the many knotty ideas it propounds, we’re still disappointed that “Winter Sleep” took the Palme in a year filled with other serious, thematically weighty films that were far more compelling, from the Dardennes’ “”Two Days One Night,” to Bennett Miller’s “Foxcatcher,” to Abderrahmane Sissako’s “Timbuktu” to Andrei Zvyagintsev’s masterful “Leviathan.”
13. “The Wind That Shakes The Barley” (2006)
Back this year with “I, Daniel Blake,” Ken Loach is basically part of the furniture at Cannes, sometimes with great results (“My Name Is Joe” in 1998, for instance), sometimes not (2014’s “Jimmy’s Hall,” a film that everyone is relieved turned out not be the director’s last). “The Wind That Shakes The Barley,” the film which won him the Palme d’Or, might not be his finest hour, but it makes sense that he’d win for it: it’s a grand, sweeping epic that exemplifies the themes and concerns of most of his work, even if it’s significantly less fun than something like “Looking For Eric.” It stars Cillian Murphy as a young Irish doctor in 1920 whose political consciousness is finally sparked by injustices perpetrated by the British, causing him to join the Irish Republican Army, which his brother is already a member of. Loach being Loach, it’s a sober, bone-dry account of a revolution, and it sometimes feels like you’re getting a very earnest, matter-of-fact history lesson rather than a work of art. But then something in Murphy’s steely central performance, or Barry Ackroyd’s beautiful photography, or a snatched scene or moment, brings the film roaring into life, and you remember why you love Loach and why you’re glad he has a Palme.
12. “Dheepan” (2015)
In light of the Coen Brothers heading up the jury last year, most figured that we’d end up with an off-beat pick like “The Lobster,” “Youth” or “Tale Of Tales,” or that they’d reward another great American filmmaker with “Carol.” So it was a reminder both that taste is a complicated matter, and that festival juries are made up of more than just their presidents, when Jacques Audiard’s “Dheepan” walked away with the prize. Snootier cinephiles were furious, but we dug the choice: it has its problems, but the French helmer’s most recent picture is a refreshing bounce-back from the sentimental sadism of “Rust And Bone,’ a canny mix of genre pic and kitchen sink that packs a real punch. The film sees its lead (Anthonythasan Jesuthasan), a former Tamil Tiger, leave Sri Lanka for France with a woman posing as his wife (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and daughter (Claudine Vinasithamby). But upon finding a home in a Paris housing project, he finds it hard to leave violence behind thanks to the presence of a local drug dealer. Falling somewhere between a Western and a fable, it’s the best use of Audiard’s particular set of skills —muscular genre chops, heart-on-sleeve sincerity, a sly empathy for his characters— since “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” even if it doesn’t quite earn the happiness of its ending.
11. “The Pianist” (2002)
After a fifty year career, Roman Polanski remains one of the most complicated figures in the history of cinema: he’s capable of the effortless brilliance of a “Chinatown” or a “Replusion,” but also the terrible “Pirates” or “Venus In Fur”; he’s suffered appalling, unfathomable tragedy on more than one occasion in his life, but also was the cause of appalling tragedy in the life of others. Fourteen years on, our feelings on “The Pianist” haven’t gotten any simpler. The film’s based on the memoir by Wladyslaw Szpilman, but it’s clearly informed by Polanski’s own experiences surviving the Warsaw ghetto and deportation (his mother was killed at Auschwitz). It’s anchored by an extraordinary performance by Adrien Brody as Szpilman, a Jewish musician who survives the atrocities forced on his people and his city by Nazi Germany, in part due to a Wehrmacht officer (Thomas Kretschmann): he pours his soul into the silent, passive eyes of the film’s subject. And yet one can sense Polanski restraining himself to some degree: the film ultimately proves more tasteful and conventional than you might expect. But then again, who could blame him? As ever with Polanski, it’s complicated.