A Final Report from the Cannes Film Festival 2009

This time, it's visceral

Comments (0) By J. Hoberman Wednesday, May 27 2009

...continued from page 1

Enter the Void

This is what desperation looks like.

More About

The press greeted other prizes with mild derision. The award for best screenplay went to Lou Ye's Spring Fever; whatever its other merits, the story of a gay-straight triangle in contemporary China was hampered by a notably rambling, uneven, and inconclusive script. The third place Jury Prize was split between South Korean director Park Chan-wook's pointlessly excessive vampire extravaganza Thirst and British filmmaker Andrea Arnold's underwhelming miserablist youth drama Fish Tank. However, the award to Arnold (who won the Jury Prize for her first film Red Road in 2006) may have been a concession to jury member, the British writer Hanif Kureishi.

Cannes jurors invariably describe their experience as a sort of life-changing love-in. But, notably unsmiling, Kureishi used the occasion of the traditional post-ceremony press conference to characterize the films under consideration as generally long and often "weird," volunteering the information that he would never wish to sit through Kinatay again.