Guessing the winners (and picking our own) at the end of Cannes 2019

While Cannes winds down on the ground, I make my way home in the sky. In some respects, it was a weird year for the festival. Genre films, for example, were everywhere, with the competition lineup going unusually heavy on guns, flying saucers, zombies, evil spirits, cultists, and mind-controlling plants. And that’s without getting into the sidebars, which had Robert Pattinson dreaming of fucking a mermaid and a severed hand crawling its way home to its owner.

The latter comes from the only movie I caught this year at Critics’ Week, one of the three other festivals that happens annually in Cannes over the same two weeks. (Past notable premieres of the fest, which programs only first and second features, include the breakout horror indie It Follows and Amores Perros, the very first movie by this year’s Cannes competition jury president, Alejandro González Iñárritu.) By chance, the film I saw ended up picking up the Grand Prize. I Lost My Body (Grade: B-), by French writer-director Jérémy Clapin, uses lush, richly shaded animation to track the pilgrimage of that aforementioned appendage, which flops out of an evidence freezer and slowly traverses Paris— battling rats and pigeons, scaling narrow ledges, dodging cars and subway trains. It’s tough to say whether the extended misadventures of Thing T. Thing could actually sustain a whole movie on its lonesome, but the film is mostly wondrous when it sticks to this wordless, outlandish scenario. Where it fumbles is in the framing device. I loved the first flashback, which plays out like Malickian memories of a kid’s life from the “perspective” of the hand he loses. But the actual story, about a North African immigrant who stalks the woman with whom he has a pizza-delivery meet-cute, is generic lovelorn drama, not really improved by the lingering question of how and when he’s going to lose that hand, à la Crispin Glover in Hot Tub Time Machine. Still, even these scenes are gorgeously animated, suggesting that Clapin could make a big move up the festival ladder next time he’s in Cannes.

“He’s Palestinian… but he makes comedies!” So says Gael García Bernal, playing himself, of director Elia Suleiman, also playing himself, in It Must Be Heaven (Grade: B+), the latter’s first movie in 10 years, which very much sticks to his winning formula of sociopolitical observation via gently deadpan vignette. As usual—with usual defined here as the roughly once a decade that Suleiman makes a movie—the writer-director of Divine Intervention and The Time That Remains stars as the largely mute “Elia Suleiman,” this time leaving his home in Palestine for Paris and then New York, becoming a fish out of water in both cities, trying and often comically failing to secure funding for another project. He’s a less bumbling, more perplexed Monsieur Hulot, and It Must Be Heaven once again puts the filmmaker’s Jacques Tati worship on full display with sight gags both cute (a bird that won’t stop hopping onto Suleiman’s keyboard while he tries to work) and a bit more pointed (two soldiers trading sunglasses in the front seat of a car, while a Palestinian woman sits silent and blindfolded in the backseat). No fan of this artist will notice a major evolution in his style or approach. But given how infrequently we actually get a new dose of it, that’s more than fine, maybe even preferable. I laughed heartily throughout—never underestimate the appeal of a comedy at a festival that supplies misery by the truckload.

As per annual tradition, I’m going to close my Cannes coverage with a shot at guessing the winners of the major awards. It’s a fool’s errand, really—there’s no way to tell what will speak to Iñárritu or the rest of the jury, which includes several other major filmmakers, like Kelly Reichardt, Paweł Pawlikowski, and Yorgos Lanthimos, as well as American actress Elle Fanning. But it’s a fun exercise anyway, and I’ll also make my own picks in each category, which I can confidently do this year, having missed only one competition title: Justine Triet’s Sibyl, which is probably screening as I type this. Until next year, thanks for reading!

PALME D’OR

Prediction
This is not one of those years when a single frontrunner for the top prize has emerged. Several winners seem possible. Iñárritu is said to be a diehard Terrence Malick fan (the two often share a cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki), though Malick won less than a decade ago, for the more universally lauded Tree Of Life. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is currently rocking the highest score in the Screen Daily critics’ poll, though the favorites of the jury and the press don’t line up that often. (Remember Toni Erdmann’s shutout three years ago?) And Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood is the big event of the fest (nothing drew bigger lines or more attention), but I’m having a little trouble seeing it win the support of this particular group—especially if they’d prefer to avoid charges of nepotism, what with one Fanning sister on the jury and the other in the film. That leaves, I’d say, either Pedro Almodóvar’s loosely autobiographical Pain And Glory or Céline Sciamma’s 18th-century queer romance, Portrait Of A Lady On Fire. And I’ll give the latter the slight edge for being both generally beloved and hard to hate; if the Palme is said to sometimes go to the film everyone on the jury can live with, as opposed to the one everyone loves, this is a strong possibility. And will another Cannes jury really turn down the opportunity to honor a film by a woman, especially in a year when a film by a woman is arguably the most acclaimed?

Preference
Nothing at the festival, inside competition or out, pulled me into its world and its point of view as seductively as Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, which builds and builds to what’s sure to be one of the great and most talked-about endings of the year. There were more ambitious films in competition this year, but Sciamma accomplished a lot with the simple pull of her craft and the empathy of her gaze, fashioning a love story that feels likely to endure far beyond this festival. (Neon will open it Stateside this fall.)

GRAND JURY

Prediction
The runner-up prize at Cannes sometimes goes to an ambitious vision, one that the whole jury maybe couldn’t agree on. (It’s been unofficially called the passion pick—a consolation prize to appease some bullish cheese-stands-alone champion or particular wing of the jury.) If that’s how they handle it this year, I have a hunch it could come down to the two giant American auteurs duking it out. And with Malick largely defaulting to his usual style (albeit applied, for the first time in a while, to a straightforward story), Tarantino’s epic but unusually relaxed Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood could get its due here.

Preference
The ingenious, insane Parasite is Bong Joon-ho’s best movie since The Host, and maybe his most purposeful, disturbing blend of genres yet. Though I suspect the jury may honor it elsewhere…