David Cronenberg's A History Of Violence was never in the running for the Palme d'Or as best film at the Cannes Film Festival, the Cannes jury revealed yesterday.
But the Toronto filmmaker's violent yet thoughtful analysis of a family in crisis was on the short list -- of up to seven films -- for some kind of prize, jury president Emir Kusturica told an official wrapup press conference.
Cronenberg ended up with nothing to show for it, however. Kusturica jibed that another jury, one filled "with genre freaks," might have given A History Of Violence the Palme d'Or because "it is a very good film."
Before last year, when Quentin Tarantino's jury faced the media to explain the controversial Palme d'Or for Michael Moore's Bush-bashing documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, the jury's deliberations were kept secret.
This year, all the inside news went public (imagine how interesting it would be if the voting results of the Oscars were released after the fact).
Kusturica and jury members Toni Morrison, the American novelist, and Agnes Varda, the French filmmaker, fessed up that the Belgian winner of the Palme d'Or, the Dardenne Brothers' street drama The Child, had two rivals.
One was American Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, starring Bill Murray --and that was Kusturica's first choice and he had to back off and not be stubborn about it. The other was Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke's Hidden.
The Child was a compromise choice they could all live with.
Jarmusch got the Grand Prix for second place overall and was satisfied, since he does not believe in competition anyway except "in chess and sports," while Haneke happily settled for the best director prize.
The win by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne put them in rare company.
In the 58 years of Cannes, only four other filmmakers have won two Palme d'Or prizes. They are American director Francis Ford Coppola, Japanese director Shohei Imamura, Swedish director Bille August and Kusturica, who was born and raised in the former Yugoslavia. His most recent win was for Underground, a crazed reverie on the insanity and violence that led to his country's breakup.
Meanwhile, the only film to receive two Cannes awards this year was American actor-director Tommy Lee Jones' The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada, which earned the best actor award for Jones and the best screenplay prize for Mexican writer Guillermo Arriaga.
The film is extremely critical of U.S. treatment of Mexican illegals crossing the border in search of a better life. Mexican-born actress Selma Hayek was the film's chief advocate on the jury this year.
But, when pressed on the issue yesterday by the Toronto Sun, she stopped short of criticizing the U.S. border patrol and some American citizens for shoddy treatment of Mexicans.
Hayek said she cannot criticize Americans for treating Mexican immigrants badly "without first taking responsibility for the harsh treatment of the Mexicans by the Mexicans."
If poor Mexicans were not pushed into such "a desperate situation" they would not feel compelled to cross the border and take such a huge risk. "So I think it's very sad that these people are put through horrible nightmares in one place (Mexico) and in the other (the United States)."
