2015 Cannes Film Festival Awards: 'Dheepan' Takes Palme d'Or

2015 Cannes Film Festival Awards: ‘Dheepan’ Takes Palme d’Or

May 25, 2015

By Brad Brevet

I’ve seen more than one person say the 2015 Cannes Film Festival quite simply didn’t live up to normal expectations. I started getting that vibe at the end of last week as it seemed there were a few “good” films coming out of the festival — The Lobster, Carol, Son of Saul, Amy — but nothing that was really wowing a large majority of those in attendance. The teaser for a recently penned story from Manohla Dargis at the “New York Times” read: “As the festival nears its close, many fine movies by revered filmmakers have been shown, but none of them are masterworks.” Many fine movies… that’s great, but the hope heading into Cannes is finding at least one film that truly knocks the audience’s socks off, but it seems this year the jeering for Gus Van Sant‘s The Sea of Trees made more headlines than anything else.

Yesterday the festival jury announced the fest’s winners and it was Jacques Audiard‘s Dheepan that took the top prize, a film I personally can’t wait to see and did see plenty of good reviews. Audiard won the Jury Prize back in 2009 for his wonderful film A Prophet and winning the Palme this year pretty much guarantees he’ll be a mainstay on the Croisette for years to come. I can live with that.

This year’s Jury Prize went to another film I’m anxious to see, Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Lobster, which will hopefully help the film find domestic distribution down the line. Otherwise I’ll have to keep my fingers crossed that it shows up in Toronto later this year.

One of the buzziest titles out of the festival was Todd Haynes‘ Carol and while I try and avoid reading reviews so as not to taint my expectations, it seemed stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara were nearly locks to share the Best Actress prize this year. Half would be true. Mara did end up winning Best Actress, but she shared it with Emmanuel Bercot for Mon Roi.

Best Actor went to Vincent Lindon for Measure of a Man and Hou Hsiao-Hsien took home Best Director for The Assassin.

The complete list of winners is directly below and I’ll be taking a new look at my Oscar predictions over the coming week and opening up all the top categories very soon now that Cannes has given us a little more to discuss. Stay tuned.

Palme d’Or