There are standing ovations and there are jury decisions.
Jim Jarmusch’s droll, quirky, very charming film Father Mother Sister Brother got a mere six minutes for its standing ovation at Venice – though one day we’re going to have to introduce some Olympic-style standardisation to these timings. But it got the top prize, the Golden Lion, from Alexander Payne’s jury.
Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine (15 minutes), with Dwayne Johnson as a troubled MMA fighter, got best director. Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia (six minutes) got Toni Servillo the best actor prize, for his elegant fictional Italian president. And Cai Shangjun’s The Sun Rises on Us All (whose standing-O doesn’t appear to have troubled the scorer) got best actress for Xin Zhilei.
But Kaouther Ben Hania got a whopping 23 minutes for her startling and audacious The Voice of Hind Rajab, which uses the real audio recording of a terrified five-year-old Palestinian girl phoning for help in Gaza before her death, with actors playing the anguished emergency responders on the other end of the line. People were sobbing in the auditorium, and predicting the surely inevitable Golden Lion would be a tipping point for international political opinion. The Venice jurors had it in their power to make history. Didn’t they?
That isn’t how it works. The Voice of Hind Rajab only earned the grand jury prize, the second prize, to online fury from those who thought this decision was a copout and a blandly pro-American copout at that.
But every jury decision is a copout. All juries are horse-trading and compromising and collectively accepting second-choice movies that no one objects to from film-makers whose prestige they all endorse. Unanimous choices are vanishingly rare. I wonder what Venice juror Mohammad Rasoulof felt this year. His film The Seed of the Sacred Fig, challenging the Iranian regime, was widely tipped to win the top prize at Cannes last year and, of course, make history in the same way. But it had to be content with the special jury prize.
At the lively post-decision press conference, Payne was confronted with questions about another juror, actor Fernando Torres, who had threatened to quit over the Hind Rajab snub. The reporters had to decide if Payne’s reply was a clear denial: “One of my jurors threatened to quit? … I did … no. Did someone threaten to quit? I think we know … not to believe everything we read online.” (The loneliness and weariness of jury-presidential command is certainly detectable in the first part of that musing response.)
Between Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother and Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, I personally would have given it to Hind Rajab. But overall, my choice would have been Francesco Rosi’s climate-change meditation Below the Clouds, or maybe Park Chan-wook’s excellent black comedy No Other Choice (whose omission from the prize list also infuriated Venice delegates, and which had to be content with the special jury prize) or even Kathryn Bigelow’s barnstorming anti-nuclear shocker A House of Dynamite which I suspect may have been too vulgar, too popcorny, to register with the jury.
As for The Voice of Hind Rajab, it is brilliant and pertinent, though my feelings about its docufictional approach were nuanced – and I wasn’t the only one.
Everyone I have ever met agrees that prizes and ribbons and cups and medals for movies are, in the end, an absurdity, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too hot under the collar when a jury does something to annoy us. If Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab is still being watched and talked about when Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother has faded, then it will have won a more important award.
