5. “The White Ribbon” (2009)
The idea that evil can be as pervasive, invisible and infectious as an invading disease has seldom been more convincingly brought to life than in this magnificent parable from Michael Haneke. Taking place on the eve of World War I, “The White Ribbon” evokes everything from Grimms‘ fairy tales to Arthur Miller‘s “The Crucible” in its simple, enigmatic story of a small German town suddenly beset by uncanny, seemingly random acts of malice. Children are often involved, though whether they are the perpetrators or the innocent victims of larger forces is left open to interpretation. Haneke’s typically gnomic assessment of the film as being about “the roots of evil” feels at first so abstract as to be an evasion, but his great power as a filmmaker lies in taking amorphous concepts and giving them hard edges. So “The White Ribbon,” shot in composed frames of crystalline black and white, actually gives an almost solid shape to the indefinable. There are critics who accuse Haneke of both oversimplifying and over-mythologizing the origin story of German fascism here. But the film’s actual impact rests not in the specificity of its location and era, but in the sweeping, ugly truths it exposes about how our social structures and hierarchies can foster humanity’s unerring instinct for cruelty.
4. “Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives” (2010)
It’s still a minor miracle (and should be a point of pride for the festival) that Apichatpong Weerasethakul has been accorded the highest cinephile honor. In an environment that year after year seems to become higher-profile in terms of its glamor, the awarding of the Palme to this utterly singular, defiantly strange and deliriously beautiful filmmaker is a reminder of everything that Cannes is supposed to be about. ‘Uncle Boonme’ is ostensibly about death, rebirth and the coexistence of the living with the dead, told through the story of Uncle Boonme’s last days as he encounters the ghost of his dead wife and the non-human spirit of his dead son. But even that logline doesn’t hint at the uncanny power that Weerasethakul’s alien narrative can exert over the viewer, nor can it do justice to the value of that glimpse we get here (and maybe even more in his subsequent masterpiece “Cemetery of Splendour“) that there are so many more things (including forms of storytelling) on heaven and earth than are usually dreamed of in our philosophy.
3. “The Tree of Life” (2011)
Adored by many as the apotheosis of philosophical, evocative, atmospheric filmmaking, and abhorred by others as the very definition of pretension and self-indulgence, Terrence Malick‘s “The Tree of Life” was definitely his most divisive film… until the two that came after. But for those of us perhaps disenchanted with a Malick who seems progressively more enchanted by the ephemeral, the gauzy and the insubstantial, “The Tree of Life” represents a kind of perfect nexus moment in his filmography —it’s the last time he had even one tippy-toe on the ground as he reached for the heavens. Partly that is due to finding, in Jessica Chastain especially, actors strong enough to forge real connections through all the flimsiness, and who could ground even the twirliest and most romanced of shots with a piercing look or a subtle gesture. But mostly, there’s a questing urgency (though not in the Sean Penn scenes, which feel relatively inert) to the film that “To The Wonder” and “Knight of Cups” both lack, and from flourishes like the famous dinosaur sequence, to the drowsy sounds of a sun-dappled suburban garden, to Emmanuel Lubezki‘s astonishing photography, “The Tree of Life” still feels like a culmination.
2. “Blue Is The Warmest Colour” (2013)
“Have you heard that there’s one film in competition that’s three hours long and full of graphic sex?” was the word on the Croisette through the 2013 festival, making it a talking point long before it premiered. Once it did, “Blue Is The Warmest Colour” somehow managed to supersede both the early gossip and the subsequent controversy about director Abdellatif Kechiche’s treatment of the actors, becoming an immediately popular Palme d’Or winner. Based on the graphic novel by Julie Maroh, it tells the story of teenage Adele (Adèle Exarchopoulos), an introverted kid who starts to come out of her shell after beginning a relationship with the blue-haired, beautiful art student Emma (Léa Seydoux). Novelistic and sprawling, the film spans years, tracing the couple in and out of love and then finally depicting the steady heartbreak of an extended break-up. It’s the most intimate kind of epic: a warm, empathetic, gorgeously made picture that feels so drawn from life that you feel like it wasn’t constructed so much as it just happened. A perfect pick from a jury headed by Steven Spielberg, and for the first time ever, the Palme was shared between Kechiche and his two leading ladies, whose performances do so much to elevate the film.
1. “4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days” (2007)
There is something of the slow drip of water torture about Cristian Mungiu‘s excoriating, unflinching abortion drama. But if its aura of relentless linear authenticity makes it such an unforgiving watch, it also is what compels us to follow the incremental, down-the-rabbit-hole story of Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) in 1980s Romania, who accompanies her friend Găbița (Laura Vasiliu) as she seeks out the illegal termination of her pregnancy. Here and in his subsequent film, the exorcism drama “Beyond the Hills” (which picked up Cannes Best Actress for Cosmina Stratan in 2012), Mungiu mines the very universal from the very intimate, constructing a grand tragedy about the evils of repressive societies choked by religion, patriarchalism and economic inequity by focusing in both cases on the most disposable people on the very lowest rungs of those structures —young women. “4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days” is a bleak experience, but it’s full of a kind of tired-eyed, fatalistic truthfulness about how societies arrange themselves purportedly for the good of all, but actually so that the upper echelons can exploit the lower. An unanswered phone, a look to camera —it’s in the tiny details of a fragile friendship tested perhaps beyond its limits that Mungiu tells the massive story of a whole society similarly bent to snapping point.
Where will this year’s winner fit in, whatever it turns out to be? With new films from Pedro Almodovar, the Dardennes, Jim Jarmusch, Olivier Assayas, Asghar Farhadi, Park Chan-Wook, Cristian Mungiu, Andrea Arnold, Xavier Dolan, Paul Verhoeven, Cristi Puiu, Maren Ade and more, there’s every expectation that the victor could end up placing highly on a list like this. To find out, check out our Cannes reviews, starting tomorrow.