Thierry Frémaux must have spread laughing gas in the deliberation room. President Vincent Lindon and the members of his jury, Asghar Farhadi, Jasmine Trinca, Ladj Ly, Noomi Rapace, Joachim Trier or even Jeff Nichols, are artists of great value but they are not renowned for their sense of humor. They however covered with gold Without filter, of Ruben Östlund, the only comedy of the competition. A real one, punctuated with bursts of liberating laughter.
Five years after his Palme d’Or for The Square, a vitriolic satire of contemporary art and political correctness, the 48-year-old Swedish director once again leaves Cannes with the supreme award. He joins the very closed club of double gold palms: Coppola, Imamura, Loach, Haneke and the Dardenne brothers (crowned with a special prize this year for Tori and Lokita).
Revealed in Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section in 2014 with Snow Therapy (a father on vacation in Les Arcs takes to his heels as an avalanche approaches, abandoning his wife and children), the Swede confirms with Without filter a sense of ruthless observation and a talent for a sharp portrait painter. He hardly spares the emptiness and vanity of his contemporaries, the shortcomings of the time in general and of the Western male in particular.
A few days away from receiving his second prize, in a hotel in Cannes, Östlund told us about the source of inspiration for Sans Filtre. “My wife is a fashion photographer. She told me the story of one of her model friends. He was a mechanic before being spotted on the street. Two years later, he was one of the highest paid male models in the world thanks to a campaign for Calvin Klein perfume. He started going bald. His agent then advised him to find a famous girlfriend to revive himself. To fall in love ? We laughed at him. I was inspired by it to create the characters of Carl and Yaya in Without filter.
Carl and Yaya, young and pretty models and influencers, embark on a yacht populated by great fortunes (Russian industrialist, British arms dealer, Tech billionaire). Cruising is not easy. The rich take dearly, but the poor (the ship’s employees) are not the pure-hearted oppressed. Woody Harrelson, he plays a Marxist and alcoholic captain, reluctant to leave his cabin to meet the passengers. Stranded on an island, a handful of survivors then reenact the class struggle by eating pretzels.
Östlund, admirer of Michael Haneke and Michel Houellebecq, two great comedians and humanists in his eyes, signs a farce that is a bit long (he can still cut) but jubilant. We can’t wait to see his next feature film, still in the planning stage. After the sea, the air. “It will take place on a plane, during a long-haul flight, explains the director. It will be titled: The Entertainment system is down. The crew announces a failure of the screens. Passengers will have to occupy themselves for fifteen hours without entertainment. The film begins at the end: the plane crashes and everyone dies. The spectator knows that all the passengers will die before seeing them get upset because the screens don’t work. The passengers really freak out when they are given a bottle of mineral water and a sandwich in compensation. I already have plenty of other ideas. We don’t know if this new film will win him a third Palme d’Or, but if so, he will be the only member of the triple palms club.
