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A
HARROWING film about illegal abortion in Communist-era
Romania beat 21 movies by well-known directors such as
Quentin Tarantino, Ethan and Joel Coen, and Wong Kar-wai
to win the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize Sunday.
Romanian
director Cristian Mungiu’s low-budget film, 4 Months,
3 Weeks and 2 Days, depicts the horrors a student
goes through to ensure her friend can have a secret
abortion.
Mungiu,
who was awarded the Palme d’Or by actress Jane Fonda,
said he didn’t even have enough money to shoot the film
just six months ago. He hoped the win would inspire
other “small filmmakers from small countries.”
“You
don’t necessarily need a big budget and big stars to
tell a story that everyone will listen to,” said the
39-year-old Mungiu, the first Romanian to win Cannes’s
top prize.
PRESENTER Jane Fonda (left)
is seen with Romanian director Cristian Mungiu as he
accepts the Palme d’Or for his film
4 Luni, 3 Saptamini Si 2
Zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) during the awards
ceremony at the 60th Cannes Film Festival.
The
films shown at
Cannes’s 60th anniversary edition ran the gamut of weighty
subjects, from death and loss, to abortion and aging.
The winners of the awards, announced by jury president
Stephen Frears (director of The Queen), reflected
the darker themes.
Japanese
director Naomi Kawase’s Mogari No Mori (The Mourning
Forest) took the festival’s grand prize, the
second-highest award, in a surprise. The film is about
two people—a retirement-home resident and a caretaker at
the center—struggling to overcome the deaths of loved
ones.
The
prize for Best Director went to American Julian Schnabel
for his French-language film The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly, based on a memoir by a French magazine
editor who became paralyzed after a stroke and learned
to write again by painstakingly blinking his eyelid.
The
movie is Schnabel’s third, after Basquiat and
Before Night Falls.
The jury
awarded a special prize to director Gus van Sant for his
impressionistic Paranoid Park, which depicts a
teenage skateboarder whose life is turned upside down
when he accidentally kills a security guard. Van Sant,
who won the festival’s top prize in 2003 for Elephant,
recruited untrained actors on MySpace.com and shot the
film in just a few weeks.
Two
films shared the jury prize:
Persepolis,
Marjane Satrapi’s moving and humorous adaptation of her
graphic novels about growing up during and after Iran’s
1979 Islamic Revolution, which she codirected
with Vincent Paronnaud; and Stellet Licht (Silent
Light), Carlos Reygadas’s tale of forbidden love set
among Mennonite farmers of northern
Mexico.
Acting
honors went to
Russia’s
Konstantin Lavronenko, who played a troubled husband in
The Banishment, a drama about a couple whose
marriage disintegrates during a stay in the countryside.
The prize for best actress went to South Korea’s Jeon Do
Yeon, who played a widow struggling to cope with her
husband’s death in Secret Sunshine.
German
writer and director Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven,
a German-Turkish cross-cultural tale of loss, mourning
and forgiveness, won the prize for Best Screenplay.
Several
high-profile movies that screened at Cannes were not in
the running for prizes, including Michael Moore’s
Sicko, Ocean’s Thirteen starring George
Clooney and Matt Damon, and A Mighty Heart,
featuring Angelina Jolie as the widow of slain
journalist Daniel Pearl.
The Coen
brothers’ No Country for Old Men, a bloody,
darkly funny tale about a ruthless killer in Texas, was
hailed by critics but snubbed by the jury. Other films
up for the top prize included Tarantino’s Death Proof,
Wong’s My Blueberry Nights, and David Fincher’s
Zodiac.
In a big
weekend for
Romania,
another film from the country took honors in a secondary
competition called “Un Certain Regard.” Director
Cristian Nemescu died in a car crash last year at age
27, leaving his California Dreamin’ incomplete.
Jurors had initially decided not to judge the film,
about US soldiers in a small Romanian village, but
changed their minds when they saw it.
On
Saturday night, festival organizers screened the late
Henry Fonda’s Twelve Angry Men, then surprised
his daughter, Jane Fonda, with a special lifetime
achievement award at a gala dinner.
Festival
president Gilles Jacob recounted Fonda’s career highs
and lows, including her controversial trip to North
Vietnam in 1972, joking that he never thought the
festival would honor someone who had been “spied on and
hounded by the FBI.”
The
69-year-old Fonda, visibly moved, put the focus back on
her father, responding in excellent French, “For my
father, his films were his way of representing justice,
quality and democracy.” She added her hope that one day,
“the United States will again become the country that he
stood for.” |
