CANNES, France — On the last day of every Cannes Film Festival, word begins to leak out about which filmmakers from the competition have been called back for the closing-night awards ceremony.
Many of us already knew, going into Saturday night’s show, that Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro, Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters were certain to go home with awards, though which film would win what remained a mystery.
Festival juries are notoriously difficult to predict, but several other critics shared my hunch that the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize, would go to either Capernaum or BlacKkKlansman. Both were among the most enthusiastically touted films in the competition, and they offered the jury a chance to anoint either Labaki, a Lebanese director who had just launched herself into the big leagues, or Lee, a veteran American auteur who had famously (and angrily) lost the Palme nearly 30 years ago for Do the Right Thing. Would they go with the striking new talent or the overdue veteran?
In the end they chose the overdue veteran, though not the one some of us were expecting. In a development as startling as it was altogether marvelous, the jury president, Cate Blanchett, announced that the Palme d’Or had gone to Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, one of the quietest, loveliest and most emotionally enduring films in the competition.
Did anyone see this coming? To judge by his genially shell-shocked reaction, Kore-eda himself certainly didn’t.
If anything, this beloved, prolific Japanese auteur had pulled off an upset as steal-thy and light-fingered as his movie, which follows a makeshift family of supermarket thieves dwelling in cramped but loving quarters. A tender ensemble piece whose skillful performances dovetail into a perfectly symphonic whole, Shoplifters is a work of such emotional delicacy and formal modesty that you’re barely prepared when the full force of what it’s doing suddenly knocks you sideways.
Like so much of the director’s work (including Nobody Knows and Like Father, Like Son), Shoplifters was so unobtrusive in its mastery that it seemed destined to be taken for granted. Mais oui, another lovely humanist marvel from Kore-eda. What else is new?
There were other factors at play too. Being the first Cannes of the post-Harvey Weinstein era, the festival was dominated by discussions of gender parity and on numerous occasions became a bold platform for the #MeToo movement. Never was this more powerfully achieved than at the closing ceremony, when the actress-director Asia Argento took the stage and delivered a fearless speech excoriating Weinstein.