Controversy at Cannes: The Headless Woman

Courtesy Cannes Film Festival

Mind games: Lucrecia Martel's Headless Woman

Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York

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When is it better not to win a prize in Cannes than to win one? When you’re Catherine Deneuve and Clint Eastwood — that’s when. Both screen legends (and perpetual Cannes bridesmaids) were awarded special honorary awards by this year’s jury — honors that smacked of career-achievement consolation, no matter Penn’s efforts to stress that they were also recognitions of their recipients’ latest work. (At least, I think that’s what Penn was saying in a rambling introductory speech that begged translation more than any of the evening’s French-language components.) Deneuve’s award was pegged to her regal performance as a disaffected matriarch presiding over a chaotic family reunion in Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale. Eastwood’s, meanwhile, was for Changeling, a fact-based, 1920s Los Angeles crime story that was the fifth Eastwood-directed film to compete at Cannes and the fifth to leave its maker Palme-less. I wouldn’t disagree that Denueve and Eastwood deserved some sort of acknowledgment: Eastwood’s film, in particular, strikes me as one of his greatest — a harrowing women’s melodrama one minute, a serpentine portrait of city corruption the next, with a tour de force by Angelina Jolie at its center. But having served on a few festival juries myself (including one at Cannes in 2005), I’m generally of the mind that the awarding of ersatz extra prizes only dilutes the value of the legitimate ones. Besides which, this whole business of giving people awards just because you like them, or because they’re overdue ... c’est très Americaine. No wonder a gracious Denueve looked faintly embarrassed as she accepted a golden trinket that all but had “You’re old, you deserve it” emblazoned upon it. Ever the tactful one, Eastwood, though still present in Cannes on closing night, elected not to show up. And that, as they say, was a wrap.

* Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story said the the live blogging of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was published on Indiewire. In fact, it was published on the blog of Indiewire.com editor Eugene Hernandez.