The 77th Cannes Film Festival ran from 14 to 25 May 2024, with a competition presided over by a jury chaired by Greta Gerwig — the first American woman to chair the jury, a fact that generated the kind of commentary that says more about the commentators than the appointment. The competition was strong, arguably the strongest since the 2019 edition; the awards were, as usual, imperfect.
The Palme: Anora
Sean Baker’s Anora took the Palme d’Or, making Baker the first American director to win the prize since Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life in 2011. The film — a screwball comedy about a New York sex worker who marries the son of a Russian oligarch — divided critics in ways that Palme-winning films usually don’t. Its defenders argued for its energy, its leading performance from Mikey Madison, and its refusal to condescend to its characters. Its detractors found the third act too long and the comedy uneasy in ways that felt unresolved rather than productive.
I am somewhere in the middle, which is probably the worst place to be. Anora is a very good film and possibly not a Palme d’Or film, but these categories may be less meaningful than critics pretend. The jury made a defensible choice.
Grand Prix: All We Imagine as Light
Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light — an Indian film, the first Indian film in Cannes competition in thirty years — won the Grand Prix and was, for many of us in the press corps, the film of the festival. Set in Mumbai among nurses from Kerala, it moves between documentary and fiction with unusual fluency, and its final act, set in a coastal village at night, achieves a kind of lyrical accumulation that I am still processing months later. That it did not win the Palme is a real loss.
Emília Pérez and the Musical Question
Jacques Audiard’s Emília Pérez won the Jury Prize and the Best Actress award (given collectively to its four leads), generating more conversation than any other film in competition. The conversation was not always the film’s fault. Full review →
The Competition in Brief
Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour won Best Director — a somewhat surprised-looking win for a formally adventurous Portuguese film that very few non-specialists had been predicting. Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, self-financed and decades in the making, screened out of competition and was received with the particular polite bewilderment that the festival reserves for ambitious failures from old masters.
The Un Certain Regard section, often the more interesting half of the festival, yielded several films worth following into general release: Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (Cannes Best Screenplay, a body-horror film of genuine ferocity) and Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, made clandestinely in Iran and premiered days after Rasoulof fled the country.
“The most politically urgent film at the festival was Rasoulof’s — a drama about a family fracturing under the weight of revolutionary court service during the 2022 protests, shot in secret by a director who had already been sentenced to imprisonment.”
What the Competition Said
Cannes 2024 was a festival about women — their bodies, their labour, their desires, their violence. Anora, All We Imagine as Light, The Substance, Emília Pérez, and several Un Certain Regard entries shared this orientation, and it felt less like a programmed theme than a reflection of who is making films and what they are thinking about. This is, on the whole, encouraging.