For once, fans, critics and jury agree — Anora is the popular winner of the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Described as a modern take on Pretty Woman, Sean Baker’s American film is a vibrant and hilarious tale of a transactional romance between Anora, a Brooklyn lap dancer, and Ivan, the feckless son of a Russian oligarch.
A huge roar greeted the announcement on Saturday night by Greta Gerwig, the American actor and Barbie director who was president of the jury. In a year of divisive films, Anora was one of the few that most people seemed to love.
Baker, a 53-year-old writer-director from New Jersey who has previously made films about transgender prostitutes and porn stars, dedicated the award to “all sex workers, past and present”. He also paid tribute to Francis Ford Coppola and David Cronenberg, veteran auteurs who had “a profound influence” on him and both had new films in competition but won nothing.
He used his speech to champion cinema releases over streaming, saying: “We have to fight to keep cinema alive. This means making feature films intended for theatrical exhibition.
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“Watching a film at home while scrolling through your phone … is just not the way, although some tech companies would like us to think so. The future of cinema is where it started: in a movie theatre.”
The Grand Prix, the second most prestigious award, was won by All We Imagine as Light, a delicate drama about three Mumbai nurses and the first Indian film to be selected for competition in 30 years.
The best director award went to Miguel Gomes for Grand Tour, a bonkers Portuguese travelogue about British colonials in Asia, and the jury prize was won by Emilia Perez, a glorious gangster musical by the Frenchman Jacques Audiard.
The Substance, a “feminist body horror” with Demi Moore, took best screenplay for its French writer-director Coralie Fargeat, and Jesse Plemons won best actor for his spineless corporate employee in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness. By convention the same film does not normally win more than one award at Cannes but nobody told Gerwig and her jury, who also gave best actress to the female stars of Emilia Perez — Adriana Paz, Zoe Saldana, Karla Sofía Gascón and Selena Gomez.
A special award for best screenplay went to the Iranian film-maker Mohammad Rasoulof for The Seed of the Sacred Fig, an extraordinary dramatisation of the protests that have swept his country. Rasoulof was sentenced to eight years in prison but escaped from Iran and attended the ceremony, receiving a standing ovation.
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Yet the laurels went to Anora and Baker, who specialises in films about marginalised hustlers, from transgender sex workers (Tangerine), to skid-row hotel guests (The Florida Project) and desperate porn stars (Red Rocket). The title role was played with chutzpah, nous and well-disguised vulnerability by Mikey Madison, who was tutored in lap dancing by the real-life strippers who played her colleagues in the film, some of whom had walked the red carpet in their translucent work stilettos.
Her character is 23, only two years older than Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), who is soon paying her for frantic sex at his ostentatious waterfront mansion, but decades ahead in maturity. Ivan is the kind of man-child who skids across the floor, plays postcoital video games and fills his swimming pool with Kool Aid. He is a brat of epic proportions — it’s a marvellously unsympathetic performance by Eydelshteyn.
When Ivan and Anora drunkenly marry in Las Vegas and Ivan’s father sends his men to force them into annulling the union, the story hits a new pitch of Coen brothers-style black comedy, before ending with a final scene of sobering poignancy. Each change of tone is handled with light-footed ease by Baker, one of the world’s best directors, who has finally got the recognition he deserves.
However, it’s hard not to shake the sense that an equally worthy Palme winner would have been Emilia Perez, which was groundbreaking, taboo-busting and formally audacious in a way that surpassed all the other competition films. The lead character, played by Gascon, is a lethal, murdering, drug-dealing Mexican mob boss turned charity worker as well as being a glamorous, gentle but conflicted trans woman. The film never feels crass or exploitative, though, asking thoughtful questions about the nature of performance in every life. It’s also an all-singing, all-dancing musical extravaganza featuring the kind of showstopping routines and tear-jerking torch songs that would make the Greatest Showman weep.
Yes, they gave it the jury prize, which is traditionally awarded to quirky works of originality and daring (Jerzy Skolimowski’s donkey movie EO was a co-winner in 2022). And yes, they also gave the best actress award to the four lead women in the movie, which seems like a pointed way of acknowledging the film’s gender-blind messaging yet clumsily overlooks the magnitude of Gascon’s all-consuming performance. It’s as if Gerwig’s jury was committed to lionising the movie but also skirting around the fact that, really, Emilia Perez was the Palme d’Or winner in disguise.
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Why did it not win? Audiard is a Cannes veteran, with a Palme d’Or in the bag for Dheepan in 2015, and multiple nominations stretching back to A Self-Made Hero in 1996. This, by contrast, is only Baker’s second Cannes entry, after Red Rocket in 2021. Plus, the festival hasn’t given the Palme to a musical since Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark in 2000.
Or maybe, in the end, it was just the year for an arthouse comedy about stripping and oligarchs rather than crooning, dancing, wildly sympathetic trans mobster heroines.
Cannes film festival 2024 winners: the full list
Feature films
Palme d’Or
Anora, directed by Sean Baker
Grand Prix
All We Imagine as Light, directed by Payal Kapadia
Jury Prize
Emilia Pérez, directed by Jacques Audiard
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Best director
Miguel Gomes, Grand Tour
Special award
Mohammad Rasoulof, The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Best performance by an actor
Jesse Plemons, Kinds of Kindness
Best performance by an actress
Adriana Paz, Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón and Selena Gomez, Emilia Pérez
Best screenplay
Coralie Fargeat, The Substance
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Short films
Palme d’Or
The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, directed by Nebojsa Slijepcevic
Special mention
Bad for a Moment, directed by Daniel Soares
Un Certain Regard
Un Certain Regard prize
Black Dog, directed by Guan Hu
Jury prize
L’Histoire de Souleymane, directed by Boris Lojkine
Best director ex-aequo
Roberto Minervini, The Damned
Rungano Nyoni, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Best actress
Anasuya Sengupta, The Shameless
Best actor
Abou Sangaré, L’Histoire de Souleymane
Youth award
Holy Cow, directed by Louise Courvoisier
1st film
Special mention
Norah, directed by Tawfik Alzaidi
1st film
Caméra d’Or
Caméra d’Or prize
Armand, Halfdan Ullmann Tondel
Special mention
Mongrel, Wei Liang Chiang and You Qiao Yin
La Cinef
First prize
Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know…, Chidananda S Naik
Joint second prize
Out the Window Through the Wall, Asya Segalovich
The Chaos She Left Behind, Nikos Kolioukos
Third prize
Bunnyhood, Mansi Maheshwari
