The French film
The Class, a frank tale about classroom
life using real students and teachers at a junior high
school, won top honors Sunday at the Cannes Film
Festival.
Directed by
Laurent Cantet, The Class (Entre les Murs) was
the first French film to win the main prize, the Palme
d'Or, at Cannes since Under Satan's Sun in 1987. The
docudrama was shot in a raw, improvisational style to
chronicle the drama that unfolds over one school year.
The win was a
unanimous decision among the nine-member Cannes jury, said
Sean Penn, who headed the panel.
''The movie that
we wanted to make had to resemble French society, had to
be multifaceted, a bit teeming, complex, and had to
sometimes portray frictions that the film didn't try
to erase,'' Cantet said.
Italian films won
the second-place Grand Prize and third-place Jury
Prize. Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah, a study of
the criminal underworld in Naples, took the Grand Prize,
while Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo, a lively
portrait of former premier Giulio Andreotti, won the
Jury award.
Benicio Del Toro
won the Best Actor prize for Che, Steven Soderbergh's
four-hour-plus epic about Latin American revolutionary
Che Guevara. Presented as two films, Che
follows Guevara and Fidel Castro's triumphant
guerrilla campaign to overthrow Cuba's government in the
late 1950s and Guevara's downfall and execution after
trying to foment a similar rebellion in Bolivia in the
1960s.
Del Toro, who
costarred in Penn's 21 Grams, also won in a
unanimous jury vote, Penn said.
''I'd like to
dedicate this to the man himself, Che Guevara,'' said Del
Toro. He also thanked Soderbergh, ''who got up every day,
forced me to this.... He was there pushing it, and he
pushed all of us.''
Soderbergh
directed Del Toro to the Supporting Actor Oscar for 2000's Traffic.
Sandra Corveloni
was chosen as Best Actress for Linha de Passe, in
which she plays the mother of four brothers struggling
to make better lives for themselves in a Brazilian
slum. It was her first role in a feature film.
Turkish filmmaker
Nuri Bilge Ceylan was named Best Director for Three
Monkeys, which centers on a father who takes the
rap for his employer's crime in exchange for financial
support for his wife and son, only to have the scheme
backfire amid bitter repercussions.
Belgian siblings
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, two-time winners of the
Palme d'Or, received the screenplay prize for Lorna's
Silence, about an immigrant woman who enters a
sham marriage to gain Belgian citizenship.
The prize for a
film by a first-time director went to British filmmaker
Steve McQueen's Hunger, set at a Northern
Ireland prison where Irish Republican Army volunteer Bobby
Sands and other inmates seeking Irish independence
staged a hunger strike in 1981.
The Cannes jury
awarded special prizes to Clint Eastwood, who directed
the competition film Changeling, and Catherine
Deneuve, who appeared in two films at Cannes this year.
Eastwood was shut
out for key prizes with Changeling, his warmly
received missing-child drama starring Angelina Jolie.
Eastwood, who won
a Academy Award for Best Picture and Best
Director with Unforgiven and Million Dollar
Baby, respectively, has never won top honors at
Cannes after five times in competition there since 1985.
Jury president
Penn won the Best Actor Oscar for Eastwood's Mystic
River, which was shut out for prizes at Cannes
five years ago.
''There was a
field of such powerful, emotional, moving movies,
performances. There was so many times that we thought, It
just can't get better,'' Penn said.
Critics judged
the Cannes lineup more harshly, however. While Cannes
presented few outright bombs this time, critics found the
films a bit tepid.
Last year's
competition included such films as Joel and Ethan Coen's
No Country for Old Men, which went on to win the
Best Picture Academy Award, and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent
Paronnaud's animated coming-of-age tale
Persepolis, which was nominated for the
animation Oscar.
A film from
Kazakhstan, Sergey Dvortsevoy's Tulpan, won a
secondary competition called Un Certain Regard.
Tulpan is the story of an aspiring shepherd on
the isolated Kazakh steppes who must wed before he can
enter his chosen trade but is refused by the only
prospective bride because she thinks his ears are too
big.
Bosnian director
Aida Begic's Snow, a drama about villagers
struggling with the decision to leave their war-ravaged
town, won top honors in another Cannes competition overseen
by critics.
After the awards
ceremony, the festival closed with the premiere of Barry
Levinson's What Just Happened? starring Robert
De Niro, Bruce Willis, and Penn in the tale of a fading
Hollywood producer trying to rejuvenate his career
amid personal and professional crises.
What Just Happened? came full circle: A year
ago Levinson and his collaborators were at Cannes filming
scenes for the movie. (AP)
