In terms of film festivals, Cannes is one of the most prestigious. Since its inception in 1946, the festival has gone through its own dramatic history of changes in formulating a singular identity that today stands as an iconic stamp of approval for a film’s quality. Any film that is lucky enough to be in the official competition, much less winning its highest honor, the Palme d’Or (created in 1955 with Marty being its first recipient).
Ninety films have won the Palme d’Or, and while no one can take away the enormous accomplishment those films have had—most especially, introducing audiences to independent films and international cinema not in the English language—it’s easy to forget the films that were in the competition alongside the eventual winners. Sometimes the films in the running are looked at more memorably due to the nature of their content. Some films have gone on to be seen as masterpieces by collective critics and essayists and are now accepted as part of our culture. I want to examine some of the films that, while did not go on to win the top prize, are deserving of being mentioned and talked about alongside the year they premiered at the festival.
10. Oldboy (2003)
Of all the films in this list, none have been more influential in the exposure and broad reach to general audiences than Park Chan-wook’s twisted tale of revenge, Oldboy (2003). Throughout the 2000s, international cinema still felt more niche to the general public than today, where films like Parasite (2019) and shows like Squid Game (2021) have dominated the cultural discourse. Oldboy is a film that has permeated through a fanbase that grew alongside easy access to international cinema.
Based on the Japanese manga series, Park Chan-wook’s adaption follows a businessman, Oh Dae-su, played to an intense degree by one of South Korea’s greatest, Choi Min-sik. He is kidnapped and imprisoned in an anonymous hotel room for fifteen years for no reason. Soon he is released, and he begins his journey to find out who is behind his incarceration and why. The film takes on a twisted revenge tale that, by today’s standards, would seem trite but, in 2003, felt fresh and unique due to the direction and filmmaking by Park Chan-wook.
Added to that, the level of commitment and a strong showcase of Min-sik’s performance snares the viewer’s attention quickly. The film’s abrasive intertwinement of sex and violence is something most American films wouldn’t think to touch, and moreover, successfully see through its concept, where no subject or idea feels off the table. There’s an unflappable boldness that makes Oldboy cinematically transgressive, which only helps them have a long-lasting reception beyond its debut.
The film premiered at the 2004 Cannes Festival, where the jury head, Quentin Tarantino, has become one of the film’s biggest fans and is partially part of the exposure of international films, specifically, South Korean cinema, to general moviegoers and film fans. The film lost the Palme to Michael Moore‘s provocative documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) but did win the festival’s equivalent of second place prize: the Grand Prix.
9. Certified Copy (2010)
Certified Copy (2010) opens with a speech by a British author, James Miller (William Shimell), describing his new book, “Certified Copy,” as an exploration of the authentic nature of art and the copies that are produced along their originals. As James continues his speech to a crowded room of fans and admirers, a woman walks up to leave a note to his translator—after sitting up front in a reserved seat (as if she was an invited guest by the author). The next day, James visits the woman (played expertly by Juliette Binoche, as she is never named in the film) in a small antique shop—her note must’ve been an invitation for him. What follows is two curious individuals whose relationship is never established nor clarified.
Binoche and Shimell anchor this heady film through their realistic mannerisms and reactions to each other, almost as if they’re cross-interrogating each other to find hidden truths. Binoche especially brings a heart-rending performance as the woman that may have been entangled with James in the past. Her day trip through this small town is a way to reconnect or come to some closure at the failure of whatever past relationship they may have had—Kiarostami never lets us in; we watch these people as spectators, almost emulating a troubled couple or strangers becoming a couple.
This was Kiarostami’s first narrative film outside of his native country. Known mainly for blending fiction and documentary storytelling in films like Close-Up (1990), by design, his films are not meant to hand-hold the viewer but to involve them in the narrative without any context. Certified Copy succeeds in examining our relationships to who we are to our loved ones, our connections to art, and how much we copy ourselves from other influences—are we originals or copies by nature? Kiarostami engages the viewer, and while this may not have lit the fire at its 2010 Cannes debut, since his death, the film has become one of Kiarostami’s most fascinating films of his career as he’s always been interested in blurring the lines of what is real and fake. What is real is the impact he’s left on a generation of artists and the kind of perverse self-awareness that seems more prominent in movies, when for Kiarostami, it’s a delicate act of balancing the real from the surreal.
8. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011)
For the 67th Cannes Film Festival, Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep (2014) became the first Turkish film to win the Palme d’Or since Yol (1982). Yet, before he would walk on stage to accept this award, back in 2011 he premiered another Turkish epic: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. After a brief prologue, the film opens on a shot of a landscape in Central Anatolian steppe—it’s nearing dark, with glimmers of orange light in the far upper-right frame. In the foreground, we see a dirt road in the center frame that begins to reveal three cars driving into the shot, with blaring yellowish lights illuminating the pathway.
Several men get out—police officers, a prosecutor, a doctor, grave diggers, and two suspects, one with their hands bound, being arm-led by someone, as other trots in front, asking questions as to where someone is buried. We don’t see their faces; we see the dialogue displayed with more back-and-forth. After not finding anything, they all go back to their cars and continue driving on. The film moves at a more leisurely pace, allowing Ceylan to utilize both the sound and landscape as characters to overwhelm this story of city officials trying to find the body of a murdered person throughout a long, grueling night. The film that results is one of the more haunting films of Ceylan’s career.
The scene is perfectly emblematic of the experience of watching Ceylan’s film, which evokes melancholy and the humdrum of a small investigation of a dead body. Long still shots of beautiful framing and lighting involving men bickering, confused while traversing the quiet terrain as they try to distract themselves of the long, distilled night with conversations of yogurt, location and geography, ex-wives, raising a family, death, and a central case the prosecutor recalls. All these topics of conversation are drawn upon to detract from the long, arduous night these men will endure, as they are small blips of an expansive land covered in darkness. Ceylan’s epic is more focused on the mundanity of trying to find a dead body in an area that looks the same the more one drives expands out into the countryside.
Some filmmakers would overdramatize the aspect of this crime by trying to dig into the interiorities of their characters and personalizing their experiences contrasted with the alleged murderers. Instead, Ceylan is more interested in creating multilayered characters that are hard to penetrate but engrossing as this tortuous night of trial-and-error is drawn out. The film’s pacing moves in an unhurried manner that is indirect and rooted in the experience of his characters that makes Once Upon a Time in Anatolia as riveting and overwhelming of an experience as his Winter Sleep proved to be three years later.
7. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
Standing ovations have almost become a joke as to how long a film’s ovation lasts at any film festival, as there seems to be an outright embrace of a film’s accomplishments. The record for the longest Cannes standing ovation belongs to none other than Guillermo del Toro‘s fantasy horror, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), at twenty-two minutes. At a time when Peter Jackson‘s Lord of the Rings trilogy had swept the Oscars, one had to wonder where the fantasy genre could go. Del Toro is an artist born from fantasy and horror—his films before Labyrinth and afterward complement his expansive imagination and love for filmmaking.
He managed to infuse the two into a fairy tale that is more grounded in the harsh realities than most mainstream films. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is a child forced to live with her sadistic, fascist stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), in 1944 Franco-Spain, where he hunts down rebels and innocents alike. She believes in fairy tales due to the escapist opportunities they can provide from the unpleasant nature of her day-to-day life. She soon encounters a decaying faun (Doug Jones), who proclaims she is the reincarnation of Princess Moanna and tells her to complete three tasks in order to return to her kingdom. But these tasks soon prove to be perilous, as real-life complications involving her pregnant mother and the captain’s dictatorial viciousness breaks into the fantasy Ofelia thought she could escape into.
While del Toro had mainstream success with previous genre films like Hellboy (2004) and Mimic (1997), it was Pan’s Labyrinth that catapulted him to international fame. An artist to take seriously as one of our most imaginative contemporary directors. Despite the acclaim and adulation it received—it wouldn’t win the Palme d’Or. However, the film would go on to be nominated for six Oscars, winning three. Del Toro’s films are far more unique and fascinating because they’re born in the present from one pulsating brain, bursting with electrons that paint the visual canvases with beauty and horror alike. His films are harsh, not out of any desire to shock, but to portray pain and suffering prevailing through the darkest depths of human depravity born from a sense of self-righteous control and power. Del Toro understands how far power can corrupt and make monsters out of man; the monsters in his fantasies show you what they are. It’s people that can easily come to you looking human but are cold and distant from anything resembling humanity.
6. Holy Motors (2012)
There are films from the Cannes Festival that can be imperceptible and require an understanding of the filmmaker and their intentions. Leos Carax‘s Holy Motors (2012) is exactly the kind of film that people would normally make fun of as to the types of art-house fair Cannes showcases. It’s completely absurd and outlandish that, on the surface, is plotless and invites both analysis and criticism. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to digest this fantastical drama about movies and the life of an artist.
Most of the film is comprised of independent vignettes where a man, referred to early on as Mr. Oscar (Denis Lavant), spends one day inside a white limousine where he dons makeup and prosthetics and portrays various strange characters in oddball situations that seem to resemble different types of narrative storytelling. In one scene, he wears a motion capture suit and simulates a snakelike creature. In another, he pretends to be an old woman beggar on the Pont Alexandre III. And in one violent, confounding sequence, he is an eccentric red-haired man that kidnaps a model (Eva Mendes) and takes her into a sewer in a style akin to a monster movie and proceeds to eat her hair. In total, there are nine of these appointments (as characters refer to these assignments), unrelated from each other than being led by an incredibly commanding performance from Denis Lavant, who walks through each freakishly avant-garde set-piece to demonstrate Carex’s view of what modern entertainment has become: separated and estranged that’s held by the artists, performers, and creators, who devote their time, energy, and soul to entertain an audience.
It seems throughout Holy Motors, Lavant is more of a humble servant for art and at times, provides comfort to various characters through his characters. At the same time, Carex manages to create an imaginative film full of unconventional wit and surprising pathos in the small, quiet moments, such as when Lavant meets a colleague, Jean (Kylie Minogue). It seems Jean is about to take her last appointment with a man, which leads to their deaths, but this is expected. Both Jean and Oscar are in service to others, to art and drama, not themselves. Sometimes the characters Mr. Oscar portrays border on different personalities residing within him. While Carex may have succeeded in confusing his audience, no film from the 2010s has endured a legacy in brazen energy and style that is distinct and singular from the breadth of movies that has emerged since its premiere. This was Carex’s first film in thirteen years after Pola X (1999). While Carex will always have a place at Cannes, as the festival has embraced for Carex to crash the party with his particular vision of what cinema can explore and how creatively rich the medium is, let’s hope he doesn’t spend another decade until he returns to the Croisette with his next film.
5. In the Mood for Love (2000)
In the Mood for Love (2000) is a love story not in the traditional sense. It’s a rumination of the unsaid and what’s not verbally spoken, yet body language and the way both Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung), a journalist, and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) are emblematic of the mood Wong Kar-wai sustains. There’s a reluctant attraction and desire that isn’t acted upon but that is born after they soon discover their own spouses are cheating on them with each other.
The film’s emotional core is drawn after these revelations. Their conversations are anything but casual. They soon play the roles of each other’s spouses and do their best to improvise as to how that affair must’ve been born. Mr. Chow and Li-zhen (now Mrs. Chan) conduct this theater for each other to not just skirt off having their own affair but to delve deeper into how the original affair transpired. Wong Kar-wai is not interested in the immediate gratification between the two hurt souls but in the emotions and complexities that could lead to gratification. The mood is melancholy, not affection; the affection they feel is born from the pains they bear from the original sin of cheating.
There comes a point where the fantasy they’re rehearsing and creating soon bleeds into the stark reality of their own interiorities. It’s here Wong directs a romance born from red lust colors and intimate cinematography that is vivid and colorful, almost tricking the viewer into thinking this pretend affair will lead to one of their own makings. However, the deficiencies both Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan feel about themselves can’t bring each other to act on the kind of love they fantasize and long for, even after much time has passed. In The Mood for Love was an instant hit. Tony Leung won Best Actor at Cannes, but it’s hard not to feel dismayed the film couldn’t win the Palme. Since its debut in the new millennium, the film has only garnered further critical acclaim and influenced films, such as our recent Best Picture winner, Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022). The emotional complexity found in Wong Kar-wai’s doomed romance is a beautifully tragic love tale that is just as affecting and will continue to reverberate through future cinephiles.
4. American Honey (2016)
The first shot of Andrea Arnold‘s epic road trip drama, American Honey (2016), is of a bright sky, as the sun glistens within the 4:3 ratio box that gives the film feeling more documentary sensibilities than an expensive-looking film. We soon see a young woman inside a giant trash bin, along with a younger girl, digging through trash, looking for food. The young girl is Star (Sasha Lane). She lives a trashy life in Oklahoma with a sexually abusive father while she cares for two children that are not hers. She encounters a group of boisterous teens as they dance and quip inside a supermarket. Star soon spots Jake (Shia LaBeouf), the second-in-command of the group of traveling magazine salespeople. There’s an awkward but charming affection between the two: Star sees Jake and his gang of rowdy teens as an escape from her personal hell, while Jake sees someone more than another recruit. Star finds herself entangled with the group of misfits. They trek the American Midwest, going town-to-town, enacting their best sob story to sell magazine subscriptions, headed by the group’s leader, Krystal (Riley Keough), who is unsympathetic and cutthroat in running her business.
The film has a looseness and baggy nature to its storytelling, which focuses on Star in her own coming-of-age, but done with a rusty sensibility rather than being clean and precise. Arnold frames this American epic through the boxed aspect ratio (aided by Robbie Ryan’s cinematography) to give the viewer the sense of intimacy and claustrophobia one feels when 10-12 people are crowded into a van—it’s a small tube of children in adult-sized bodies making sense of their place in the world while exploring the land that’s bigger than the slums they came from. There’s a free reining sensibility through the rough grime in which Arnold lends the film a sense of freedom through the wild antics these teenagers become involved, and how that feeling slowly morphs Star’s sense of her identity and what lies ahead, long after she tires of the grind of selling useless magazine subscriptions.
It’s criminal how underappreciated the film was at the time of release, but its appreciation has only increased since its Cannes debut. The film fell short of winning the Palme in a very competitive field but would go on to win the Jury Prize, and my love for the film will only increase over time. Sasha Lane is a genuine revelation. Having no acting experience prior, she makes her performance look effortless without ever trying to grab the viewer’s attention. In fact, a majority of the cast are unknowns which gives the film an authentic nature. The film is long, at 162 minutes, and the pacing can be off. Still, I simply become transfixed as soon as Rihanna‘s “We Found Love” plays in the supermarket when Star and Jake first see each other. This is a beautiful film—a freeing film that reminds you of memories of when you traveled as a child. Only your parents knew where you were going, but you were excited, full of butterflies in your stomach. Arnold captures all the grace and pleasure in a pastoral picturesque Americana of free-spirited independence.
3. Mulholland Drive (2001)
I can’t think of a film that has had a ripple effect in terms of filmmaking and film analysis than David Lynch‘s surrealist nightmarish take on Hollywood in Mulholland Drive (2001). To describe the plot would prove to be futile, as the narrative is not the point, but the experience one has when watching his masterpiece. We’re introduced to Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), a young, bright-eyed, wannabe actress, hoping to stake her claim in Hollywood. She encounters a strange woman in an apartment that belongs to her aunt. The woman escaped from a car crash on Mulholland Drive and can’t remember her identity. She goes by Rita (Laura Elena Harring) after seeing a Rita Hayworth poster of the film Gilda (1946). Betty agrees to help Rita uncover her identity, but soon the pair find themselves going deeper into the insidious and grotesque machinations of Hollywood. The plot description is as inconsequential to the ethereal nature Lynch manifests through a series of bizarre visual elements and narrative twists that keeps the viewer from seeing Lynch’s hands.
Since its debut at Cannes, Mulholland Drive has been analyzed through numerous different interpretations, none of which Lynch has confirmed. No two people who watch this film will come away with the same interpretation. It’s not hard to realize why this neo-noir didn’t win the Palme, as no unifying jury could ever come to the same determination of the film’s overall thesis. Thankfully, the jury did award David Lynch Best Director, solidifying that whatever he may have concocted, his vision came from him alone. Watching Mulholland Drive, you get the sense you’re peering into someone’s dreams. A kaleidoscopic backdrop of images, ideas, emotions, and experiences that perhaps are only tethered by the filmmaker creating the illusion of any coherence. Much like how cinema is distilled to the classic 24-frames-per-second of moving images, Lynch’s ideal of setting the viewer up for one type of film, only to pull the rug out from under them shows a level of admiration for pulling off the best cinematic trick: instead of a Hollywood dream we witnessed a Hollywood horror show, the desecration of many Betty Elms in an industry that’s about showing business.
2. Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2019)
Premiering at the 2019 Cannes, viewers latched onto Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Sciamma’s historical French drama of an artist recounting a painting of a subject she calls “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” and the blossoming love born from that experience. The artist, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), arrives on an island in Brittany, where she’s commissioned to paint a portrait of a young woman, Héloise (Adele Haenel), who is to be married off to a nobleman. Marianne is informed by Héloïse’s mother, The Countess (Valeria Golino), that she refuses to pose for any painting, and the way Marianne can paint her in secret is to pose as her companion and spend enough time to retain details of Héloïse, and have a full-fledged portrait. Marianne and Héloïse slowly from their friendship, as Marianne begins to see her subject as more than a subject. Marianne’s intense glances toward Héloïse commit to memory the way Héloïse carries herself.
The way Sciamma utilizes the cinematography that transports the viewer into viewing Héloïse through the female gaze. Sciamma subverts the male perspective of beauty in women in order to have a feminine way of perceiving female beauty. The film evolves into a romance that develops between Marianne and Héloïse, as the beautiful second act revolves around their unrestrained love and affection. The few days spent with each other blur the line between artist and subject and allow the artist the vulnerable position to be seen by the subject. The closeups—comprised of glances and stares—train the audience to view Héloïse through a feminine lens, Beautifully framed by Claire Mathon. The film is dreamy and tranquil without feeling airy or ungrounded. The beauty that transpires from their relationship is complimented by the gorgeous scenery that surrounds the island.
Sciamma creates a rich film full of elegant longing between characters whose time with each other will be cut short. In that limited time Marianne and Héloïse spend with each other, it’s not interested in titillating the audience with depictions of the tired and hackneyed tropes laden in lesbian love dramas that have sullied the cinematic library. Sciamma wisely knows the film is rooted in a form of solidarity in the freedom against the transactional love accepted as part of the norm in this period. Héloïse does not want to be married, and the portrait her mother has commissioned is a validation of the kind of cheap, thin love she hasn’t experienced. The film’s central performances—Merland & Haenel—are extraordinary. The subtle erotic tension that arises from their interactions is mesmerizing, as their full embrace of each other slowly unravels as the film climaxes into a poignant scene where Marianne draws a private image of Héloise into a notebook that subtlety manages to come back in potent form near the end. Sciamma’s reflective romance has managed to not endure but thrive and cultivate its own base of fans that will continue championing one of cinema’s most marvelous romances in recent years.
1. Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Charlie Kaufman‘s Synecdoche, New York (2008) is not just one of the best films of his career, it’s one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen. It’s a film that’s taxing to watch, simply due to the pathetic nature of its lead character, Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), and his own insecurities compounded by the narcissism of the work he hopes to complete, to leave his own mark in a world that’s quickly forgetting him. It’s not a film that necessarily invites the viewer into a pleasant experience. For Kaufman, being alive and conscious is the most unpleasant experience.
The term “synecdoche” is a literary figure in which a part of something is used to represent or refer to its whole. Synecdoche in the film is a play on the real-life city of Schenectady, New York; the film revolves around Caden constructing a play version of life inside a giant warehouse, where he casts actors to play real-life versions of each other—soon he hires actors to play him and his wife—all of this to demonstrate the mundanity and casualness of life to find the “brutal honesty” of how he perceives the world. The production becomes elaborate and ridiculous as the warehouse soon grows into a large-scale mimic of the city on the outside, and actors soon hire other actors to play the versions their actors are portraying. It’s a little silly, sad, and powerful. Death is what looms over this grand gesture of creative endeavors—Caden worries his life will not mean anything if he doesn’t create something meaningful and all-consuming as this play, yet is plagued by his neuroticism and constant tinkering of what he hopes is a perfect representation of his cowardly existence.
The film is not interested in providing answers or solutions, unsympathetic in comforting the audience, and nor is it Kaufman invoking the eccentricities and offbeat humoristic sensibilities present in the previous films he’s written—the film is Charlie Kaufman. It’s heartbreaking in making you feel affected without an ounce of cynicism; it’s absurdly comical due to the nature of how farcical the lengths at which Kaufman takes Caden and the world around him in the number of doppelgangers representing the cast and crew. Tom Noonan turns in a delicately-droll performance as Sammy, someone who’s studied Caden so much he believes he’s the perfect actor to play Caden (almost too perfect). Hazel (Samantha Morton), a potential love interest that Caden pines for in the beginning, agrees to buy a house that’s on fire (literally). Is she signing her own death certificate? Is death something we all agree upon with every decision we make? Kaufman lets us decide, and that’s the majestic beauty in this film. We’re invited into his head—it’s a world unlike anything seen, and it’s only fitting that his directorial debut proved to be such a financial disaster that he’s had difficulty getting funding from studios. Most films that lose the Palme rarely leave a mark this indelible. Synecdoche, New York, is one of the greatest losers of the Palme d’Or. Winning or losing wouldn’t change the content of this masterpiece—it only reinforces Kaufman’s hope that good art will continue to prevail. Synecdoche prevailed.
For a full list of my favorite past competitors that missed the “Top Ten,” click here.
Article Courtesy of Paul Rai
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