Palme d'Or race: Amour vs Holy Motors

It is the last day of the 65th Cannes Film Festival. Only two Competition films – Jeff Nichols’ Mud and Im Sangsoo’s The Taste of Money – remain to be unveiled.  The race for the Palme d’Or is on the homestretch.

The focus of the punters is on three horses: Michael Haneke’s Amour, Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone and Leos Carax’s Holy Motors. My money is squarely on the last named film, embellished with beguiling visual poetry and moments of rousing cinematic purity.

Could Hong Sangsoo’s In Another Country, Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love, Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills, Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt or Walter Salles’ On the Road sneak through and upset all calculations? That seems highly unlikely.

The nine-member jury led by Italian actor-director Nanni Moretti holds the cards and we can only speculate as the countdown to the awards ceremony on Sunday evening begins.

Past Palme d’Or winner Haneke has delivered a film that is easy to fall for. Amour, about ageing and and dying and their emotional and physical costs, is an exquisitely crafted cinematic work that is disarmingly simple and direct in its appeal: the hallmark of a great director at his very best.

It would, however, be surprising if Amour bags anything more than the best direction prize and an acting award for Emmanuelle Riva’s measured performance as a geriatric woman whose worsening medical condition puts a strain on her doting husband and all that their long marriage has stood for.   

Providing stiff competition to Riva will be Academy Award-winning French actress Marion Cotillard, whose star turn in Rust and Bone as a whale trainer who suffers a devastating accident at work has also attracted rave notices.

Nicole Kidman as an “oversexed Barbie doll” in The Paperboy, Kristen Stewart as the free-spirited May Lou in On the Road and Cristina Flutur as a woman possessed in Beyond the Hills are in with an outside chance of causing an upset.

Leos Carax’s first full-length film in over a decade, Holy Motors has divided critics here – some have loved it, others have ripped it apart – but it is just the sort of boundary-breaking film that has Palme d’or written all over it. Much, of course, will hinge on what Moretti and his jury (five directors, three actors and a fashion designer) make of the film’s amazingly audacious and visually arresting tropes.

Holy Motors’ Denis Lavant, who assumes 11 different guises in a shape-shifting tour de force, is the odds-on favourite to win the best actor prize. The others in contention in this category are Jean-Louis Trintignat of Amour and Mads Mikkelsen of The Hunt. Watch this space.