‘Amour,’ a Wrenching Love Story, Wins at Cannes

In the days leading up to the awards, the word buzzing through the festival was that “Amour” didn’t stand a chance of winning a significant prize because the head of the competition jury, the Italian director Nanni Moretti, had profoundly disliked Mr. Haneke’s violent 1997 shocker, “Funny Games.” Rounding out this year’s jury were three other directors (Alexander Payne, Raoul Peck and Andrea Arnold); one fashion designer (Jean Paul Gaultier); and four performers (Hiam Abbass, Diane Kruger, Ewan McGregor and Emmanuelle Devos). That Mr. Haneke first won the Palme in 2009 for “The White Ribbon” was largely thought to be another factor working against him.

To judge by the unusually sustained standing ovation that greeted the announcement of the Palme, “Amour” seemed like the only possible choice. In accepting the award, Mr. Haneke shared the stage with the movie’s two actors, who both were accompanied to the stage. Ms. Riva, born in 1927, was last at Cannes officially in 1959 with that classic of the French New Wave, Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” Both Ms. Riva and Mr. Trintignant spoke briefly after Mr. Haneke did. The visibly frail Mr. Trintignant (born in 1930), whose astonishing career includes some of the most famous European films of the past half-century — “A Man and a Woman,” “Z,” “My Night at Maud’s,” “The Conformist” — said that, for him, Mr. Haneke was the greatest director working today.

Plagued by unseasonably rainy, cool weather, this year’s event had been characterized by a soggy red carpet and shivering starlets. The mood among critics had often seemed just as damp, and, seated in a theater across the hall from where the awards were presented, the critics continued to vent their spleens by loudly booing Matteo Garrone’s “Reality,” the surprise — and very deserving — Italian winner of the Grand Prix. Effectively the award for the runner-up, this prize was introduced by the Iranian actress Leila Hatami (“A Separation”), and the award itself was announced, like all the major awards, by Mr. Moretti. “Reality” turns on a fishmonger who ruinously upends his life when he becomes obsessed with appearing on a reality television show. Mr. Garrone won the same prize in 2008 for “Gomorrah.”

The directing prize proved an even bigger shocker when Mr. Moretti called out the name of the Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, whose experimental, elliptical competition entry, “Post Tenebras Lux,” had been harshly booed after its first press screening. The screenwriting prize went to another favorite, “Beyond the Hills,” from the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu.

“First of all, it’s good to be here again,” Mr. Mungiu said, speaking in English, noting that his film, about oppression in a monastery, had been based on a true story and the suffering of real people.

His young stars, Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan, shared the actress prize, which was introduced by Alec Baldwin, in Cannes shooting a documentary with the American director James Toback.

The prize for best actor, introduced by the actress Gong Li, was awarded to the very fine Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, who played a schoolteacher accused of child molesting in Thomas Vinterberg’s divisively received art-house melodrama, “The Hunt.”

“I’m touched, I’m really touched,’ said Mr. Mikkelsen, who is perhaps best known to international audiences for his work in blockbusters like the James Bond reboot “Casino Royale,” in which he played a villain. Mr. Mikkelsen said that he wanted to share his award with everyone who had worked on the film, including Mr. Vinterberg, whose far superior movie “The Celebration” shared the Jury Prize here in 1998.

The Caméra d’Or, for best first feature, went to the deserving American film “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” directed by Benh Zeitlin.

“It was the first film of almost everyone who worked on it,” said Mr. Zeitlin, whose film was originally shown at the Sundance Film Festival in January. “Thank you to everyone who helped me on this film,” he said, adding that, when growing up, “Cannes is the temple, and you never know if you’re allowed to dance in the festival.”

The Palme d’Or for the short film, introduced by the Belgian director Jean-Pierre Dardenne and the Australian singer Kylie Minogue, was awarded to the Turkish film “Sessiz-Be Deng,” directed by L. Rezan Yesilbas. Ms. Minogue appears in Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors,” a French critical favorite that was shut out.

The Jury Prize went to “The Angel’s Share,” the British director Ken Loach’s 11th feature in competition. Cannes is known for its auteur allegiances, the only real explanation for why this lightweight feature was in competition. The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami was also back in competition, for the fifth time, with “Like Someone in Love,” a genial if unmemorable tale shot in Japan about an old man, a call girl and her boyfriend, which failed to win anything.

Since becoming the festival’s director-general, Thierry Frémaux has also made it an obvious mandate to showcase genre movies, work influenced by Hollywood and Hong Kong and not just European art cinema. It’s a fine experiment, even if this year’s highest-profile examples were both duds and left without any prizes: “Lawless,” a dreary Virginia moonshine tale from the Australian director John Hillcoat, and “Killing Them Softly,” a gleeful shoot-em-up with Brad Pitt from the New Zealander Andrew Dominik.

Again and again, the main competition failed to generate the kind of enthusiasm stirred up elsewhere at the festival. The highly regarded “After Lucia,” from the Mexican writer and director Michel Franco, won both critical love and top honors in Un Certain Regard, a sidebar of the official selection dedicated to nominally more adventurous work. That film’s sometimes harrowing story centers on a high-school girl who, soon after moving to a new city, is increasingly brutalized by her classmates. An attractive, almost too textbook example of a contemporary art film, “After Lucia” works because nothing is overexplained visually or through the dialogue, and the narrative is hinged to a psychologically complex character. At its simplest, the movie seems to be about bullying, but, as the story unfolds and deepens, and the students strip away the girl’s identity, it evolves into an inquiry into fascism.

The main prize at Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (Directors’ Fortnight), a prestigious parallel section outside the official festival lineup that has kick-started numerous important careers, went to “No,” from the Chilean director Pablo Larraín. One of the most widely praised movies here, “No” stars a terrific Gael García Bernal as an advertising hotshot who, on the occasion of Chile’s constitutionally mandated national referendum in 1988, helps create a hilariously upbeat ad campaign to oust Gen. Augusto Pinochet from power. The movie, picked up for American distribution by Sony Pictures Classics, is precisely the kind of aesthetically daring, intellectually invigorating work that the official Cannes selection needs to shake up the event and the critics.

The grand prize at Critics’ Week, another parallel section outside the official Cannes selection, known for its discovery of young talent, was given to “Aquí y Allá” (“Here and There”), about a Mexican man recently returned from the United States, by the Spanish-born director Antonio Méndez Esparza. Additional Critics’ Week prizes went to “God’s Neighbors,” from the Israeli director Meni Yaesh, and “Los Salvajes,” from the Argentine Alejandro Fadel.

The International Federation of Film Critics handed out prizes to “Beasts of the Southern Wild”; the strong “In the Fog,” from the Belarus-born Sergei Loznitsa (shown in the official competition); and a French film, “Hold Back,” from Rachid Djaïdani (Directors’ Fortnight).