Confined in a Cannes villa, Spike Lee and his jurors in search of the Palme d'Or

Clap of the end on the most gargantuan Cannes Festival that it is. As if to avenge the White Year caused by the coronavirus, twenty-four films were in the running for the Palme d'Or, and more than 150, in all, screened in eleven days to critics, producers and moviegoers around the world. The Spike Lee jury will have a hard time deciding the seven compulsory prizes: the palme d'or, the grand prize, the prizes for the direction, the jury, the screenplay and the prizes for female and male interpretation. Difficult at the end of a frantic competition, where French feature films were present en masse with eight productions, to discern and predict what could win the membership of the African-American director of

Do The Right Thing

, very militant, and his comrades such as Mylène Farmer, Tahar Rahim, Maggie Gyllenhaal or Mati Diop.

Read also: Cannes Film Festival: the list of critics of the

Figaro

Locked up, the group will spend a few hours of debates on Saturday that we imagine ignited in a Cannes villa, as tradition dictates.

When all goes well, the list of the lucky ones is completed in the middle of the afternoon.

Decisions are taken by absolute majority of voters in the first two rounds of voting and by relative majority in subsequent rounds.

Will they be the first jury to award a palme d'or to a woman in two decades?

The triumph of Jane Campion and her

Piano Lesson

seems so far away.

Meet at 7.15pm.

Read also: Cannes Film Festival: where are the women directors?

A very solid end to the festival

As in the last edition in 2019 with

Parasite

, last minute favorites are able to turn things upside down.

Featured Friday,

Justin Kurzel's

Nitram

tackles the subject of gun control.

He caused a sensation.

The feature film revisits the genesis of a shooting in Australia, which killed 35 people in 1996, focusing on the profile of the young shooter.

Its performer Caleb Landry Jones is a serious contender for the award for best actor.

He has a powerful rival in the person of fellow countryman Simon Rex, who shines in his role as an ex-pornstar who has returned to his hometown for a fresh start (

Sean Baker's

Red Rocket

).

Spike Lee was seen exchanging a few words with the comedian.

Caleb Landry Jones, revelation of

Nitram

CHRISTOPHE SIMON / AFP

For the palm, the darling of journalists around the world is called

Drive My Car

, by Japanese Ryusuke Hamaguchi.

This dazzlingly aesthetic film-river, adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami, features two beings haunted by the past.

A theater director traumatized by the death of his wife and a self-effacing young woman who is assigned to him as a driver.

Both resign themselves to facing their ghosts together.

The Hungarian Ildiko Enyedi also marked the spirits, Wednesday, with

The Story of my wife

, one of the most polished films of the competition, a sumptuous story of love and sailor with Léa Seydoux, acclaimed by our critics.

The

Drive My Car team,

directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who confronts us with our ghosts.

JOHANNA GERON / REUTERS

Cinema loves women who love themselves

The radical staging proposals that have split the exegetes have been legion: the rock opera

Annette

de Carax,

Petrov's Fever by

Russian filmmaker under house arrest Kirill Serebrennikov, the daydream of the Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul, palme d'or in 2010,

Souvenir

filmed in Colombia, the puzzling

Titane

by Julia Ducournau, which caused some discomfort in the theater… Jacques Audiard also surprised his connoisseurs with his romantic

Les Olympiades

, a story about polyamory filmed in black and white in the 13th arrondissement of Paris.

The Olympics

is one of the many aspirants to stage cunnilingus (identified by some facetious critics) and sapphic love.

In addition to

Benedetta

by Paul Verhoeven, who traces the fiery love between two nuns in a medieval convent, figure the couple formed by Marina Foïs and Valeria Bruno-Tedeschi in

La Fracture

.

In

Compartment N ° 6

by the Finnish Juho Kuosmanen, love between women, again normalized, is simply one of the possibilities offered by life, through a “fluid” conception of love and sexuality.

Love at first sight in Grünerløkka

Nobody resisted the charm of Renate Reinsve, revelation of the fortnight.

VALERY HACHE / AFP

Compartment N ° 6

is not the only Scandinavian film to have woken up festival-goers.

Julie (in 12 chapters)

, a keen observation of the amorous manners of today's youth by the Norwegian Joachim Trier, is in the lineage of the bitter

Fleabag

series

.

He caused a collective thunderbolt for his heroine, Renate Reinsve, 33 years old.

Despite the rebound of the delta variant, the pandemic did not spoil the reunion of the 7th art. Even shrunken and rarefied, the legendary festivals of the Croisette were there. Criticized by some foreign participants (especially Americans), forced to give an extract of saliva in tubes every 48 hours, repeated tests did not detect a cluster. So much the better. The many pictures of too many spectators taking off their masks during the screenings had circled the planet faster than a starlet stumbling on the steps. Aware of the challenges and the image for the festival, its organizers have never ceased to remind the recalcitrant to order. Cannes is well worth a mask.