CANNES FILM FEST HIGHLIGHTS

May 29, 2007 American diva Jane Fonda handed over the Cannes Film Festival’s top award, the Palme d’Or, to a little-known Romanian director Cristian Mungiu as the organizers of the 60th Cannes Film Festival rolled the end credits of the diamond anniversary edition Sunday night with a phalanx of star power, a welter of self congratulation and an idiosyncratic selection of prizes.

The hard-hitting winner is set toward the end of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu''s rule, and it had made the early running at Cannes Film Festival, with critics calling it a favorite only three days into the competition.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days takes place over a single day and tells the story of Gabita illegally aborting an unwanted baby and the trials of her friend and accomplice Otilia. It portrays not only characters'' personal misery but also the drab grimness of life in the former Communist country.

Munguiu said he hoped that the award would give encouragement to modest filmmakers from small countries. “It seems that you do not need big budgets and stars to make a story that can grab the attention of the whole world,” he said.

On Monday the Riviera town seemed as if the cavalry had pulled out as the 30,000 movie professionals and 4,000 media representatives plus the stars and the bodyguards wended their way home. For the last 12 days the town has upheld its reputation as the undisputed mecca of film, despite pretensions for its crown from such similarly veteran events as Venice.

The jury overseeing the official competition under British director Stephen Frears faced tantalizing choices, among the them Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which contains a formidable performance by Matthieu Almaric, and Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, a brutal and meticulous adaptation of Cormac McCarthy''s novel. These two went unrewarded.

Other winners included Japanese director Naomi Kawase''s The Mourning Forest, which took the Grand Prix and Gus Van Sant''s Paranoid Park, which picked up the special Cannes 60th Anniversary Prize. Julian Schnabel took the best director prize for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, about French Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a massive stroke while driving his young son down a country road in France. A few weeks later he woke up in a hospital, unable to move anything but his left eye. His condition was called locked-in syndrome. French actor Mathieu Amalric portrays the editor as a complex and unsentimental figure.

Russian actor Konstantin Lavronenko won Best Actor for his role in The Banishment, while South Korea''s Jeon Do-yeon won Best Actress for Secret Sunshine.

The Jury Prize was shared by Iranian animation Persepolis and Mexican director Carlos Reygadas''s Stellet Licht.

Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin''s The Edge of Heaven was awarded the prize for best screenplay for his film, which deals with men and women of Turkish extraction, who are as uneasy living in their adopted countries as their own skins. Akin elicits sympathetic, lived-in performances from his actors and extracts a moving performance by Hanna Schygulla.

Meanwhile, Anton Corbjin’s Control won all the top prizes at the Directors’ Fortnight. In black and white, it focused on the late British rock singer Ian Curtis who committed suicide at 23, and his group Joy Division. Actor Sam Reilly was the talk of the town as Curtis. It marked the movie-directing debut of rock photographer Corbijn.

Earlier the President of the Cannes Festival, Gilles Jacob, bestowed a special Golden Palm on American actress Jane Fonda, paying tribute to her career and her commitment. This makes the fourth career achievement Palme d’Or bestowed to an actor or filmmaker during the history of the Festival. The three others went to French directors Alain Resnais and Gerard Oury as well as French actress Jeanne Moreau.

Jacob ironically remarked, “I would never have imagined that the Cannes Festival would honor an FBI suspect, one who has at least 20,000 pages in her file,” in allusion to all her active participation against the war in Vietnam and more recently against the war in Iraq. He continued, “You are a fighter and a winner.” —Richard Mowe