Back to selection
Cannes 2025: Awards, Young Mothers, Sentimental Value, Resurrection
Resurrection The cinema world was quick to juxtapose an image from the climax of this year’s award ceremony—where Iranian director Jafar Panahi took home the Palme d’Or for his generously-received It Was Just an Accident—alongside one in which this year’s jury president Juliette Binoche protested Panahi’s 2010 arrest and imprisonment while she accepted her Best Actress prize for Certified Copy. The latter image, one of the most indelible of recent Cannes history, also circulated a bit after the lineup was announced several weeks before the festival began, as many doubted Binoche’s capacity for impartiality. Whether or not Panahi’s film needed only to be at least decent (or, rather, acquired by Neon) in order to secure the Palme, it was hardly the only prize that felt preordained. Indeed, the palmarés that Binoche and her fellow deliberators delivered could have been AI-generated without anyone having to watch the movies at all, so closely did the prizes align with early buzz, critical darlings, and assumed biases held by the jury members. (I admit, however, to being surprised by somnolent South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo’s declared enthusiasm for Kleber Mendonça Filho’s long and immaculately immersive The Secret Agent, which won both the best actor prize for its lead, Wagner Moura, and best mise en scène for its director—a combination you might assume means it’s also the best film, but Cannes’s prize distribution rules preclude monopolies on accolades.)
The Jury Prize (i.e. de facto 2nd runner-up) was shared between Oliver Laxe’s sensuous Sirât (my personal pick for the Palme, even if it doesn’t sniff the best films of any other Cannes competition this century) and Mascha Schilinski’s grim Sound of Falling, while Best Actress was earned by Nadia Melliti for her sensitive portrayal of a closeted teenage lesbian in Hafsia Herzi’s The LIttle Sister. Herzi’s film also won the Queer Palm, a prize I’m more inclined to be critical toward, given the number of stronger, queerer queer films I saw that were eligible. This includes Pedro Pinho’s I Only Rest in the Storm, examining post-colonial tensions between Europe and West Africa via a bicurious Portuguese environmental engineer who travels to Guinea-Bissau for work; Harry Lighton’s unassumingly bold anti-romance, Pillon, in which a mild-mannered member of a barbershop quartet, Colin (Harry Melling, still best remembered as Dudley Dursley in Harry Potter films), becomes the submissive of new biker boyfriend, Ray (Alexander Skarsgård); and Lucio Castro’s Drunken Noodles, which utilizes the talents of DP Barton Cortright (who worked on recent projects by the likes of Ricky D’Ambrose and Joanna Arnow) to evoke and pay homage to its maker’s influences—namely, João Pedro Rodrigues and Alain Guiraudie—as its floats across its fragmented portrait of an immigrant art student forging a variety of romantic connections in and around New York.
The Belgian two-time Palme winners Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne have won something for every film they’ve screened in Cannes’s competition with the exception of Two Days, One Night (2014) and The Unknown Girl (2016), and their new one Young Mothers, joined their other winners by taking home the best screenplay prize. Closer to an omnibus than anything else they’ve written, the film is essentially an interwoven collection of four schematic social realist tales of teenage girls who each seek help from a maternity assistance home in Liège. While the brothers’ trademark humanism remains distinctive relative to their imitators, the distribution of the film’s focus across four character arcs rather than one blunts the impact of all of them. Occasional scenes in which actors share the frame with a baby allow for some nice realist dynamism to creep into the diegesis, but I will ask Peter Debruge to kindly pass me whatever he was on that inspired him to claim that no Dardenne film could be “mistaken for a documentary … until now.”
The festival’s Grand Prix (i.e. runner up) went to Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, a film heavy on its title’s adjective and low on its noun. The Bergman- and Assayas-esque premise reunites the Norwegian director with Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World), here portraying a stage actor, Nora, estranged from her filmmaker father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), who we’re told is very highly regarded for his craft. (The segment we see from the end of one of his most acclaimed early films looks profoundly mediocre, and every other example of his genius is suggested by long and pensive stares into some distant memory or other.) Gustav has written a film for and about Nora, except that her lingering antipathy toward the man who abandoned his family, as well as her unstable psychological state resulting from same, leads to her passing on the role, which prompts him to instead offer it to Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), “one of the greatest actresses of her generation.”
I could never tell if I was supposed to accept the exemplary talents of these people as self-evident or if Trier intended all of this as satire. In my opinion I was laughing at the movie and never with it, largely because Sentimental Value’s portrayal of this family and their creative milieu was so logically and tonally at odds with itself. Should I not have scoffed when Nora’s sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) declares that their father’s new script might be the best she’s ever read before she encourages Nora to read an exemplary page from it that she should not mind is overwritten? Should I still make an effort to take any of this seriously after the (obviously intentionally comedic) moment in which Gustav attempts to educate his 10 year-old grandson about women by gifting him DVDs of Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher and Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible? Like its characters to each other, and whatever Trier’s motivations, Sentimental Value attempts to speak greatness to its audience — an assumed cinephile viewer too blinkered to tell the difference between this and the real thing.
See also: Bi Gan’s Resurrection, winner of this year’s made-up award (“Special Prize”) because Binoche claims she liked it too much to not give it something. I might have shared her enthusiasm if I’d only seen the movie’s first section—a gorgeously and intensely innovative 20-minute silent cinema pastiche that lays out the movie’s conceit: People became immortal after society learned how to stop dreaming (which is apparently what ages you). Those who resist a dream-less existence are called “fantasmers” and lead non-linear lives, jumping through time and space as one would encounter in a dream or cinema, obscuring the divide between illusion and reality. “Big Others” try to restore order and linearity in the world, and Resurrection follows one of them (Shu Qi) as she hunts down and develops a romance with a particularly unruly fantasmer (Jackson Yee).
The movie, which many doubted would be ready in time for its screening (what I saw passes for a finished film, though I wouldn’t be shocked if the film’s team continues to work on the effects), features no less than five different film styles, genres, and or techniques, and concludes—as Bi’s work seemingly always will—with a showy single-take sequence that conflates a subjective gaze for a realist one. This one runs around 35 minutes, is applied to the most contemporary chapter of the film (set in 1999), and has more conspicuous wipes and edit points than the filmmaker’s “oners” usually bare. I am generally on board with movies that operate with the oneiric fluidity that Resurrection takes as its very subject, but I’m beginning to fear that Bi is evolving into more of a technician than a seasoned filmmaker. Once the expressionistic prologue gives way to its noir-ish second part, I was almost immediately adrift, which would be fine—welcome, even—if the Bi had thought more clearly about the way these images were creating a dialogue with his audience. It brought to mind Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room (2015), a comparably epic plunge into and out of the Canadian’s cinematic id, and which far more successfully strings its viewers along for the ride, simply by insisting on a coherent spatial and temporal logic. I fully believe that Bi loves and has smart ideas about cinema, its history and how it ought to be made, but if he’s working from the position that the medium and our imagination about it is dying/dead and needs to be resurrected, he could be a lot more convincing that the undertaking is worth the effort. Merely dwelling on the past is getting very old.
