On location in the French Riviera, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN reports from the 60th Festival de Cannes.

THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL, the world’s single most important cinema event, ignored British and American movies on its prize-giving day. The festival, which ended its 12-day run on May 27, honoured a Romanian film, Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days with the top Golden Palm. Helmed by Cristian Mungiu, the movie dramatises the horror and dilemma of two university students, one forced to abort her child and other helping her to carry it out during the stifling dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. Through stark images, Mungiu builds up the tension the two girls face in a regime where abortion is a crime. Termed “pitch-perfect” and “brilliantly acted” by Variety, the film often conveys unbearable suspense without undue political sentimentality. That the suspense does not eventually lead to unpleasant or frightening consequences may be seen by some as somewhat flat or even disappointing. But Ceausescu’s remarkable ability to achieve precisely that can also be seen as an eloquent testimony of his directorial genius.

Another Romanian work, California Dreamin’, directed by Cristian Nemescu, won the top prize in A Certain Regard, an important sidebar to the Festival’s main Competition. Nemescu died last year in an automobile accident. He was only 27.

This year at Cannes, there was no British movie among the 22 in Competition, and of the four American films here, only one, Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, walked away with the Festival’s 60th Anniversary Prize. Van Sant, who had earlier won the Golden Palm for Elephant, once again treads familiar territory of adolescent behaviour, this time focusing on a young skateboard rider’s guilt and fear after he accidentally kills a security guard on a railway track.

While most awards were anticipated, the biggest surprise of the evening was the Grand Prize for Japanese director Naomi Kawase’s The Mourning Forest about a young woman who befriends an old man in a retirement home after the death of her child. Splashed with breathtaking imagery, the movie examines loneliness and the longing to depart in one man.

Another head-scratcher was the Best Actor Honour for Konstantin Lavronenko for what I felt was a wooden performance in Russian work The Banishment, by Andrei Zviagintsev. One of the many movies in the Festival that explored relationship and religious faith, The Banishment was not one I or most other critics admired.

One that did arouse some admiration and some criticism as well was Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Night. It had brilliant visuals, yet was tryingly slow. But the jury, headed by Britain’s Stephen Frears, gave it the Jury Prize as it also did for the animated film, Persepolis, adapted from her memoirs of an Iranian girlhood.

This May, I did see strong female performances, and even in French movies the women kept their clothes on. Asia Argento’s performance was often striking in films such as Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales and Catherine Breillat’s Old Mistress. But the Best Actress Award went to Jeon Do-yeon for her heart-rending performance in the Korean movie, Secret Sunshine by Lee Chang-dong.

The Best Director was Julian Schnabel, whose French work, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, was based on Elle magazine editor-in-chief Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir. He wrote this after he was completely paralysed with just one eye working.

The prize for Best Screenplay went to Fatih Akin for The Edge of Heaven. This story takes place in both Germany, where Akin was born, and Turkey, where his parents came from. The Edge of Heaven seems especially timely given Turkey’s current political situation and the mutual ambivalence brought about by its desire to join the European Union.