CANNES, France — "It's not Cannes — it's HBO." Such a turn on the pay-cable service's frequently irritating slogan could've been the watchwords Sunday night at the award ceremonies of the 56th annual Cannes International Film Festival.
It's where the director Gus Van Sant's "Elephant," which was made for Home Box Office, won two prizes, the Palme d'Or (the top prize) and best director. One member of the jury, Patrice Chereau, whose glittering, dark suit and amused Mediterranean swagger made him look like version 3.0 of "The Terminator," made a note that the jury unanimously agreed in requesting an exception in bestowing this year's prizes. Rather than spread the wealth, the jury awarded three separate films two prizes each.
It was certainly exceptional for an American film, the first ever submitted for the festival competition by HBO, to be acknowledged in such a way. Van Sant's "Elephant" is a documentary-like examination of an ordinary day in a mostly white, middle-class high school in which the calm is splashed with a corrosive burst of violence: Two boys arm themselves and begin shooting. The picture mirrors the horrific events at Columbine High School, and its influences stretch from the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman to Ambrose Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."
"Elephant," which comes only a year after Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" received an award here, raises the profile of this festival as a place for films charged with a need to shock the status quo. The Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf's film "At Five in the Afternoon"' — about a young Afghan woman who decides she wants to break free from the Taliban by running for president — won the Prix du Jury. DirectorDenys Arcand's compassionate melodrama "Barbarian Invasions," a combative waiting-room comedy on the Canadian medical bureaucracy, also won two awards: for the director's script and for best actress, which went to Marie-Josee Croze. On Friday, Harvey Weinstein of Miramax said that "The Barbarian Invasions" had been acquired for U.S. distribution by his company.
The jury, which included the director Steven Soderbergh and the actress Meg Ryan, chose as its criterion for exception the daily double. In addition to two prizes going to "Elephant" and "The Barbarian Invasions," the deadpan Turkish comedy drama "Distant" by Nuri Bilge Ceylan also picked up a pair of awards: Grand Prix and the best actor prize, which went to the film's co-stars, Muzaffer Ozdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak. Neither actor was there to accept — it was disclosed that Ozdemir was too shy for such an event and, tragically, Toprak was killed in a car accident after the film was accepted at Cannes. New Yorker Films purchased U.S. distribution to the film.
Because of the odd tenor of the films in competition — many were so unremittingly unendurable that you expected an announcement requesting that cell phones be kept on, rather than off, so that the occasional ringing would keep audiences awake — the expectation was that the exception Chereau warned the audience about might refer to shocking choices from the competition's films ending up in the winners' circle. Audiences were conflicted about these movies: They either disliked them or they hated them.