Photo: Aurore Marechal/Getty Images
This year’s decidedly strange, Hollywood-less, AI-haunted Cannes Film Festival concluded Saturday evening with the 79th annual closing ceremony, where Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord won the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or — the seventh Palme win in a row for distributor Neon. Barbra Streisand was meant to show up to the ceremony receive a honorary Palme d’Or, but was waylaid by a knee injury. Jury president Park Chan-wook and jury members Demi Moore, Chloé Zhao, Stellan Skarsgård, Ruth Negga, Laura Wandel, Diego Céspedes, Isaach De Bankolé, and Paul Laverty gathered onstage, and then Isabelle Huppert appeared as if by magic, while being described by the announcer as “the most enigmatic actress.”
Huppert was wearing a glittery black dress with a white collar — a little severe, a little cheeky. “There are voices that cross the century,” Huppert began, enigmatically. “Barbra Streisand is one of them. It’s often said, and I think it’s true, that cinema is the art of the gaze. Sometimes it becomes the art of listening. When she sings in Funny Girl, whispers in The Way We Were, directs Yentl, which at the time was almost insolent — a woman who does all of these at the same time in 1983, that’s a form of silent revolution.“ She went on to talk about Streisand’s infamous “obstinate faith in herself,” quoting her memoir, where she spoke about knowing herself and what she’d become at the age of 5.
“I love the idea that one can be, in the same body, a filmmaker, an actress, a singer, and a writer,” said Huppert. She spoke about how Streisand has “never felt totally at ease with celebrity,” how she’s “a woman for whom work is the true locus of happiness.” We tend to speak about Streisand, she continued, as if “she’s a mystery, a perfectionist … these are often the words [to describe] women who dare.” She added that Streisand “said no often. And that’s why we love her so much.” American cinema “was afraid of her for a long time,” continued Huppert, “because she occupied a position no woman was supposed to occupy. She cultivated her singularity instead of hiding it. She went from Barbara to Barbra. To paraphrase the famous sentence, ‘You’re not born Barbra Streisand, you become it.’”
More than once she referred to her as “my dear Barbra,” and recalled attending a DNC fundraiser at her house in the ’80s. What do Barbra Streisand and Isabelle Huppert, two obstinate and enigmatic women, talk about when they’re away from the prying eyes of the public? Huppert may have given us a hint tonight. Halfway through her speech, she looked at the audience. “I want to make a confession,” she said to Streisand (who, to be clear, was not there). “I love your hands. You have the most beautiful hands in the history of cinema.”
She spoke about Streisand’s 15-year struggle to make Yentl, marked by “a refusal to give up. And what a film. About the love of oneself. Not a woman object, ever — a woman subject. Who thinks, who desires, who chooses….the Palme D’Or isn’t a reward. A career like yours can’t be rewarded. It can be contemplated. It’s a way of saying, we know we have seen, we have heard.”
We watched some clips from Streisand’s storied career — Funny Girl, Yentl, The Way We Were, even the completists-only Up the Sandbox — before Barbra appeared suddenly and gigantically on a screen, likely from within the bowels of her Malibu home.
She thanked the festival, and told a story about her entry to cinema. “Right near my high school was a small theater. The Astor, it was called, which showed foreign films in black and white by directors like Trofa, Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa. I was mesmerized by those images on the screen. They were so powerful that they’re still in my head.”
“I wanted to be an actress and live in those other more interesting worlds.Years later, I was lucky enough to work with great directors like William Wyler, Vincent Minnelli, Sydney Pollock, and I realized I was always looking at the movie as a whole, not just my part and I asked a lot of questions. I had suggestions. Although I didn’t realize it at the time I was thinking like a director, trying to figure out how to tell the story. And I had stories I wanted to tell, like Yentl, about a 19th-century Jewish woman who had to masquerade as a man to get an education — but I was a woman, which was an obstacle to people and even worse, I was an actress who wanted to direct, so every studio turned me down and for 15 years, the project was on the verge of collapsing. But I had to make this movie, and that’s the kind of passion I think all of us here tonight share for film in a crazy volatile world that seems more fractured every day.”
“It’s reassuring,” she continued, “to see the compelling movies at this festival by artists from many countries. Film has that magical ability to unite us, opening our hearts and minds, and that’s what we’re really celebrating at Cannes and I’m so proud to be part of this community. Merci beaucoup and viva la cinema!” She disappeared.
Official Selection Competing for Palme d’Or
Amarga Navidad — directed by Pedro Almodóvar
Coward — directed by Lukas Dhont
Das Geträumte Abenteuer (The Dreamed Adventure) — directed by Valeska Grisebach
El Ser Querido (The Beloved) — directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen
Fatherland — directed by Pawel Pawlikowski
Fjord — directed by Cristian Mungiu
Garance — directed by Jeanne Herry
Gentle Monster — directed by Marie Kreutzer
Histoires De La Nuit (The Birthday Party) — directed by Léa Mysius
Histoires Parallèles (Parallel Tales) — directed by Asghar Farhadi
Hope — directed by Na Hong-Jin
L’inconnue (The Unknown) — directed by Arthur Harari
La Bola Negra — directed by Javier Calvo, Javier Ambrossi
La Vie D’une Femme (A Woman’s Life) — directed by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet
Minotaur — directed by Andreï Zviaguintsev
Moulin — directed by László Nemes
Nagi Notes — directed by Fukada Koji
Notre Salut (A Man Of His Time) — directed by Emmanuel Marre
Paper Tiger — directed by James Gray
Sheep In The Box — directed by Koreeda Hirokazu
Soudain (All Of A Sudden) — directed by Hamaguchi Ryusuke
The Man I Love — directed by Ira Sachs
Palme d’Or
Fjord — directed by Cristian Mungiu
Grand Prix
Minotaur — directed by Andreï Zvyagintsev
Best Director
Javier Calvo, Javier Ambrossi for La Bola Negra and Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland
Jury Prize
The Dreamed Adventure — directed by Valeska Grisebach
Best Screenplay
Emmanuel Marre for A Man of His Time
Best Actress
Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto for All of a Sudden
Best Actor
Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne for Coward
Palme d’Or for Best Short Film
Para Los Contincantes (To Opponents) — directed by Federico Luis
Un Certain Regard Prize for Best Film
Everytime — directed by Sandra Wollner
Un Certain Regard Jury Prize
Elephants in the Fog — directed by Abinash Bikram Shah
Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize
Iron Boy — directed by Louis Clichy
Un Certain Regard Best Actor
Bradley Fiomona Dembeasset for Congo Boy
Un Certain Regard Best Actress
Marina de Tavira, Daniela Marín Navarro, and Mariangel Villegas for Siempre Soy Tu Animal Materno
Honorary Palme d’Or
Peter Jackson
Barbra Streisand
John Travolta
Cinéfondation
First Prize: Laser-Cat by Lucas Ache
Second Prize: Silent Voices by Nadine Misong Jin
Third Prize: Never Enough by Julius Lagoutte Larsen & Growing Stones, Flying Papers by Roozbeh Gezerseh and Soraya Shamsi
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