Cannes 2016: Peter Bradshaw's festival verdict and…

Cannes 2016: Peter Bradshaw's festival verdict and award predictions

It was the year that Cannes prepared itself, spectacularly, for a terrorist attack by staging a full-dress armed incursion the week before. As it turned out, this was the only recognition of the security situation in France: there were no films about it.

Elsewhere, the politics of Cannes manifested themselves in the auteurs’ individual statements. Ken Loach, in his I, Daniel Blake, gave a blistering attack on food-bank Britain and political austerity. Andrea Arnold’s American Honey featured a disagreeable chancer selling dodgy magazine subscriptions door-to-door: he wears black trousers and braces which make him “look like Donald Trump”. It could be that salesmen will always bring anxiety-capitalism with them. Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman is about a couple whose souring relationship is linked to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

Andrea Arnold’s American Honey Photograph: PR Image

Meanwhile, the cast of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Brazilian movie, Aquarius followed up that film’s political satire by showing up on the red carpet carrying placards denouncing Brazil’s new administration as the beneficiaries of a “political coup”.

It was also the year that the big directors took on genre pictures. Olivier Assayas made a scary suspense movie in the form of Personal Shopper – and a great performance from Kristen Stewart helped sell it to the crowd. That seasoned provocateur Nicolas Winding Refn gave us a freaky horror with his The Neon Demon: again, it depended on a very strong performance from a Hollywood star, Elle Fanning.

Romania has had another huge year on the Croisette. Two big-hitters from that country, Cristian Mungiu and Cristi Puiu, gave us films which anatomised the state of that country’s ruling class and also hinted at signs of a poisonous Ostalgie: a feeling that things have not advanced since the era of Ceaușescu, and might be worse. Oddly, the year’s German movie, Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, was mostly set in Romania, and featured a performance from its seasoned character and bad-guy specialist, Vlad Ivanov.

2016 has also been the year of comedy on the Croisette, a genre traditionally neglected. Toni Erdmann showed that Germany can do broad comedy which travels outside its borders and Bruno Dumont’s Slack Bay delivered big, goofy laughs.

Here are my predictions for this year’s prizes:

Palme d’Or
Graduation (dir: Cristian Mungiu)

Grand Prix
Aquarius (dir: Kleber Mendonça Filho)

Jury Prize
Personal Shopper (dir: Olivier Assayas)

Best director
Nicolas Winding Refn for The Neon Demon

Best screenplay
Jim Jarmusch for Paterson

Best actor
Peter Simonischek for Toni Erdmann

Best actress
Ruth Negga for Loving