Well, somebody had to win.
In what many critics groused was the worst Cannes Film Festival ever, the 2003 edition ended Sunday with Gus Van Sant's Elephant walking away with the Palme d'Or.
With no clear favorites emerging during the 10-day long fest, the acclaimed indie filmmaker's experimental drama about a Columbine-like school shooting took home the top prize and the award for Best Director.
Surprisingly, it was the first trip to the Croisette for the helmer of such art-house hits as Drugstore Cowboy and To Die For, as well as the Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting.
"Thank you very much, from the bottom of my heart," a shocked Van Sant said upon accepting the honor from French actress and jury member Isabelle Huppert. "For years, I tried to bring one of my films to the Cannes Festival and this time, it's invigorating to receive such a prize. Vive la France!"
Van Sant was applauded for his use of real high school students in a largely improvised, low-budget HBO production examining adolescent violence through a series of intertwining episodes and flashbacks.
Michael Moore mined similar material last year in his documentary Bowling for Columbine, which won a special jury prize at the 2002 Cannes.
Van Sant's Elephant-ine victory upset Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier's latest love-it-or-hate-it melodrama, Dogville, starring Nicole Kidman, which was thought to be the frontrunner going into Sunday's awards ceremonies. But the film went home empty-handed.
Director Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions, a French-Canadian tearjerker about a dying professor confronting death, won Best Actress for Marie-Josee Croze, who played a young junkie, as well as for Best Screenplay.
The jury, which also included Meg Ryan and Steven Soderbergh, ended up splitting the award for Best Actor between Muzaffer Ozdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak, who played two alienated cousins unable to connect with each other in the Turkish film Distant, which also took the festival's runner-up Grand Prix award. But Toprak wasn't on hand to see his film crowned--the 28-year-old filmmaker was killed in a car accident last December.
Five in the Afternoon, Samira Makhmalbaf's poetic look at women in post-Taliban Afghanistan, took home the festival's Jury Prize. The 23-year-old Iranian filmmaker's Blackboard won the Grand Jury Prize in 2000.
Unlike last year's slate, which offered up Aki Kaurismaki's The Man Without a Past and the Palm d'Or-winning The Pianist, which went on to win the Oscar for Best Director, most of the 20 entries in this year's contest failed to live up to expectations, with few films drawing any buzz.
The most notable exception was the dissed Dogville and The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story, the first in an intended trilogy from Welsh auteur Peter Greenaway, who attempts to channel James Joyce byweaving the history of uranium together with the epic voyages of a travel writer. Also in the running was Clint Eastwood's latest crime drama, Mystic River, starring Sean Penn.
The consensus biggest turkey was Vincent Gallo's overly arty The Brown Bunny, which he wrote, directed and starred in.
The film, a seemingly neverending road movie capped off by a graphic oral sex scene between Gallo and costar Chloë Sevigny, was greeted by boos and garnered so much bad buzz that a humiliated Gallo apologized to his backers and called the festival one of the worst weeks of his life.
Roger Ebert would agree with him. The critic said this year's slate was the worst he could recall since he started attending Cannes 30 years ago.
Here's a complete list of the 56th Annual Cannes Film Festival winners:
Palm d'Or: Elephant, directed by Gus Van Sant (United States)
Grand Prix (runner-up): Uzak (Distant), directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey)
Best Director: Gus Van Sant (United States)
Jury Prize: Five in the Afternoon, Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran)
Best Actress: Marie-Josee Croze, The Barbarian Invasions (France-Canada)
Best Actor: Muzaffer Ozdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak, Uzak (Turkey)
Best Screenplay: Denys Arcand, The Barbarian Invasions
Camera d'Or (first-time director): Christopher Boe, Reconstruction (Denmark)
Special Mention Camera d'Or: Sedigh Barmak, Osama (Afghanistan)
Short Film: Cracker Bag, directed by Glendyn Ivin
Grand Prix Short Film (runner-up): L'Homme Sans Tete, directed by Juan Solanas
Lifetime Achievement Award: Jeanne Moreau