Palme Pilots: 10 Important Cannes Winners

Austrian director Michael Haneke is known for films that force bourgeois characters – and viewers – to confront  the savagery beneath their own thin veneer of civilized existence. But in Amour, the savagery is the byproduct of a universal enemy, time. The “love” of the title, between two long-married seniors, is put to the ultimate test when the husband (Jean-Louis Trintignant) must tend to his suffering, deteriorating wife (Emmanuelle Riva) after she’s incapacitated by a stroke. It’s a universal story, one that Haneke persuaded Trintignant to come out of retirement to film, and one that turned out to appeal to audiences and critics all over the world.

Amour seemed to win or at least get nominated for every prize in world cinema. In America, it became one of the few foreign-language movies ever nominated for Academy Awards for Best Picture, Screenplay, and Director. At 85, Riva became the oldest Best Actress nominee ever. Of the movie’s five Oscar nominations, it won one trophy, for Best Foreign Language Film. Of course, it all started with the movie’s Palme d’Or victory at Cannes.

It was a nice milestone for Haneke, who’d won the Palme d’Or three years earlier for The White Ribbon, so Amour made him one of just seven repeat winners. It was also a likely career-capper for both Trintignant and Riva, both icons of the French New Wave. Half a century after they’d helped change the world of cinema, it seemed fitting that their homeland film festival was finally paying them homage.