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You only have to take a quick look at a ranking of the Palme d’Or winners to recognize that the winners circle for the prize represents some of cinema’s greatest accomplishments. “Taxi Driver,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Parasite,” “Paris, Texas,” “The Leopard,” and many more masterpieces were correctly bestowed Cannes’ highest honor, and the swaths of great films to receive the Palme since the festival’s beginning in 1946 have given the prize a prestige that arguably surpasses the Oscar or more widely recognizable trophies.
But the quality of any film is a subjective matter, and every Palme d’Or is ultimately decided not by an exact science, but by a small jury handpicked every year to judge the titles in the festival’s main competition. So, for all the great movies in the Palme pantheon, there are plenty that haven’t aged well in the decades since, or those that were greeted by the general cinephile world as underwhelming choices at the time of their crowning.
And then, there are the choices that inspire love and devotion from those that like them, but scorn from the naysayers. Cannes is a notoriously polarizing festival where emotions get amplified by the hype that runs thick in the Croisette — think of how many films received loud boos upon their premiere, and how many received upward of 10-minute standing ovations. It’s not shocking, in this context, that the winner of the festival’s top prize has a tendency to draw aggressive reactions, whether positive or negative.
Some of the most divisive Palme picks include deliberately shocking and upsetting movies, ones like “Titane” that rather obviously weren’t made for everyone. And then there’s the classic robbery complaints that any winner of any reward will typically have to shake, but are particularly prominent when the Palme goes to a surprise victor. Whatever the case, for all the universally beloved Palme winners, there are plenty of others that draw a less firm consensus.
As we await to see which of the Palme d’Or contenders this year take the prize, IndieWire is revisiting some of the more divisive Palme recipients in recent memory. Read on for a list of the most divisive Palme d’Or winners ever.
‘Wild at Heart’ (1990)
‘Wild at Heart’ is already one of David Lynch’s most polarizing films, so giving it the Palme d’Or was a predictably polarizing decision. The road movie, starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as lovers on the run, received wild applause during its premiere, but faced jeering and boos from audience members upon being handed the 1990 Palme. Leading the criticism of the film was Roger Ebert, a longtime Lynch critic who wrote a scathing review calling ‘Wild at Heart’ ‘dishonest.’ The film has generally improved in public perception since 1990, but is still regarded as one of Lynch’s weaker films.
‘Secrets & Lies’ (1996)
Nobody had a massive problem with ‘Secrets & Lies’ upon winning the Palme; the Mike Leigh kitchen sink drama received positive reviews and a raft of Oscar nominations in 1996. However, a small contingent of people who championed the much more divisive and singular ‘Crash’ by David Cronenberg criticized the selection as a safe choice compared to the far more daring option; a situation not helped due to the kerfuffle over the Jury awarding Cronenberg’s psychosexual drama a Special Jury Prize. As the years have gone on, ‘Crash’ has risen in esteem as a masterpiece, and cinephiles are far more likely to look at ‘Secrets & Lies’ as a time the jury got it wrong.
‘Rosetta’ (1999)
During the 1999 Cannes festival, every pundit had money on Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘All About My Mother’ winning the top prize. So when the jury awarded the Palme to ‘Rosetta,’ a coming-of-age drama from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, it instantly became one of the more controversial jury decisions ever. A large part of why people didn’t see it coming comes from how ‘Rosetta’ was the last film in the entire competition to screen, resulting in many skipping it. ‘Rosetta’ received positive reviews, but the perception that its selection caused ‘All About My Mother’ to be snubbed was so widespread that it led to persistent rumors of a feud between jury president Cronenberg and Almodóvar, which both have denied over the years.
‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ (2004)
No Palme winner has more aggressively been of its moment than ‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’ Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary takedown of George Bush and the Iraq War. Debuting at Cannes to a wild 20-minute applause, the political fire of the film swept up the Quentin Tarantino-headed jury and got it the Palme. But even at the time, ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ getting the Palme raised some eyebrows. Conservatives of course criticized it for its strong liberal-leaning message, but the film also had detractors who thought its political worth didn’t outweigh its cinematic failings. At the ceremony the year later, the festival president called the film’s win an event that ‘probably won’t be repeated’ and called for politics to be mostly left out of jury selection. And as the film has aged 20 years later, its win over films like ‘2046’ and ‘Oldboy’ feels all the more puzzling.
‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’ (2013)
‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’ is notably the only film where the Palme was given to more than just the director behind the project; stars Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos shared the prize with their director Abdellatif Kechiche. And unlike a lot of films on this list, ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’ received universally positive reviews when it premiered at Cannes. However, in the years since, the reputation of the lesbian romance has been significantly affected by allegations of poor behavior on Kechiche’s part on the set of the film. Crew members accused the director of unprofessional conduct and violating labor laws, while Seydoux and Exarchopoulos both publicly stated that they would never work with him again. ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’ still has plenty of admirers, but its offscreen controversies helped the film develop a large base of detractors as well.
‘Titane’ (2021)
To get a sense of how divisive Julia Ducournau’s sophom*ore feature was during the 2021 Cannes Festival, every year a critics grid is published rating the films based on the choices of 10 critics, on a scale of 1-4. ‘Titane,’ a body horror film about a woman with a lust for cars, scored a whopping 1.6, giving it one of the lowest scores in the festival. Reviews were divisive for the film, which many thought was shocking for the sake of shock while others (like IndieWire’s David Ehrlich) declared it a masterpiece. Still, the jury liked what they saw and gave ‘Titane’ the top prize, beating out a more universally praised car film in ‘Drive My Car.’
‘Triangle of Sadness’ (2022)
There aren’t notable offscreen controversies with Ruben Östlund’s ‘Triangle of Sadness’ that affected its reputation; the film merely proved heavily, heavily polarizing among critics when it came out. Many saw Östlund’s film as a hilarious and smart satire of class disparities and the cluelessness of the upper class, while other critics blasted the film as out-of-touch, smug, and overly cartoonish. The film ultimately went on to get an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, but its detractors are still a loud and vocal contingent against it.
