The 79th Cannes Film Festival closed Saturday May 23 with the Palme d'Or going to Cristian Mungiu's Fjord — a film in which a rural community turns on a family — selected by a jury chaired by Park Chan-wook. [1][2] Pedro Almodóvar's Bitter Christmas did not win. Sony Pictures Classics, the film's U.S. distributor, has not issued a statement on Almodóvar's Wednesday May 20 press-conference line that Europeans must "become a kind of shield against these monsters like Trump, Netanyahu or the Russian." [3] Sunday is Day Four.

The paper's Saturday brief on Day Three of the silence put the choice in front of the distributor: either stand behind the director or distance the release, and either is a position. The Day Four reading is that SPC has chosen neither, and the Palme to Mungiu has now changed the room around the silence. Fjord's community-turns-on-family thesis reads back into the political compound that Almodóvar named on the dais rather than resolving it.

The structural read is that the distributor's silence is the institutional artifact, not the press conference itself. Almodóvar said what he was going to say; SPC's choice is the one that determines the U.S. release campaign for a Spanish-language Cannes Competition title against a Trump-administration backdrop. The next test is Tuesday's post-Memorial-Day distributor calendar — when SPC publishes the U.S. release date for Bitter Christmas and whether the announcement comes with or without a director quote.

-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles