Swedish director winner of 70th Cannes Festival

It was not a great festival. Among the 19 features selected for the competition in Cannes, there were quite a number of "mediocre" films, besides some good films. I had three favorites: "Loveless" by Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, "Happy End" by Austrian Michael Haneke and "The Square" by Swedish director Ruben Östlund. The jury, presided by Pedro Almodovar, chose to give the Palme d'Or to the Swedish title, leaving Haneke out of the game. 

Of course, it would not be fair to give any prize to Haneke, who already has two Golden Palms, as there were also many critics who were not satisfied with the recent Haneke film. But it was not only Haneke forgotten in the awards list; renowned filmmakers François Ozon, Jacques Doillon Sergey Loznitsa, Michel Hazanivicius and Hong Sangsoo were also out. 

Östlund was the winner of Un Certain Regard Jury Prize in 2014 for his film "Snow Therapy." In his new film he criticizes Western society as a totality, with its moral degeneration, disintegration of family values, lack of solidarity between individuals and the fear of the "other." The refugee crisis as well as the hypocrisy of the arts circles is treated with irony in this film. 

Östlund's creative cinematography brings a second Palme d'Or prize to Sweden, many years after Ingmar Bergman.

A film that was not among my favorites, "120 Beats per Minute" by the French director Robin Campillo, received the second prize, the Grand Prix, most probably due to its emotional approach in depicting the activities of "Act Up," a militant gay group in Paris in the early 1990s. The love story at the center of the film and the didactic scenes concerning AIDs fighting are carefully interwoven, but as a whole it is unnecessarily long and cinematically...