Cannes' Animal Farm

On prize night, people expected a dog. They got an Elephant. But the 56th Cannes Film Festival was full of dogs — bad films — yapping at the heels of critics and distributors. Critics, who rarely agree on anything, would gladly have voted a prize, unanimously, to this year's Festival selection as the Worst in Memory.

Before the Festival, and all through it, the big word was Dogville: a 3hr. epic from Danish maverick Lars Von Trier, whose last film Dancer in the Dark had won Cannes' Palme d'Or in 2000, and starring a luminous cast led by Nicole Kidman, Oscar winner for The Hours. The film, set in a 1930s Colorado village but shot in Sweden, won favorable notices from most of the 1,500 critics at Cannes. In a thin — indeed, emaciated — field, Dogville was widely seen as the front runner for this year's Palme d'Or, and Kidman was considered a lock for the Best Actress kudos.

Yet on Sunday night the Festival Jury, led by French theater and film director Patrice Chereau, mentioned Dogville not at all; the favorite was shut out. Instead, Gus Van Sant's Elephant, another slice of small-town Americana that ends with an apocalyptic bang, took the Palme d'Or as the top film, and Van Sant was named Best Director.

Denys Arcand's French-Canadian comedy-drama The Barbarian Invasions was given prizes for Screenplay and Best Actress (Marie-Josée Croze, who played a junkie supplying heroin to the drying hero). Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Turkish film Uzak, a city-mouse-country-mouse parable, won the Grand Jury Prize (second place) and a joint Best Actor citation for the two leads, Muzaffer Ozdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak. Adding poignancy to the award was the knowledge that Toprak, the director's cousin, had died in a car crash last December, the day of learning that his film had been accepted for the competition. Rounding out the awards list was Samira Makhmalbaf's At Five in the Afternoon, which won the Jury Prize (third place).

Conspiracy theorists are ever evident at Cannes, and this year's Palme d'Or cued whispers of a gay Mafia: the presentation of the top prize from one of the few openly homosexual French directors (Chereau) to one of the few openly homosexual mainstream-American directors (Van Sant). But Chereau was one of nine Jury members, all with their own wills and constituencies. If Dogville had won, theorists might have seen a sinister connection between the film's star, Nicole Kidman, and Jury member Meg Ryan, who stars later this year in the Kidman-produced In the Cut.

What's more likely was a coalition of opinion that the Palme should be awarded, at this moment in political and cultural history, to a film seen as critical of the United States. On that count, Elephant qualifies, sort of, since its subject is the American addiction to gun violence — the same topic Michael Moore addressed in last year's Cannes attraction Bowling for Columbine.