Gender equality flies in face of style bias

The Cannes Film Festival is a grand hierarchy with strictly defined elevations of movies and media access, where films are met by high praise or lowly boos. And so there was a strange fittingness that the scandal of the 68th Cannes Film Festival, where all status is measured, came down to the importance of a few inches.

Woman's footwear, of all things, was thrust to the forefront of Cannes after several women were turned away from a premiere because they weren't wearing high heels but flats. It was the kind of Cote d'Azur tempest that often overtakes Cannes, especially because the prevailing theme of this year's festival was female equality in film - the kind of roles thrust to the center of movies and the people directing them.

Cannes was in sync with the attention the issue had recently received elsewhere. But what will stick in the mind from the festival, which closed on Sunday with Jacques Audiard's refugee tale Dheepan winning the Palme d'Or, likely won't be the many panels about women in film, but the plethora of powerful leading performances by women, including Cate Blanchett (the sumptuous period romance Carol), Emily Blunt (the bleak drug war thriller Sicario), Marion Cotillard (a bleakly stylish Macbeth), Margherita Buy (the moving tribute My Mother), Emmanuelle Bercot (the up-and-down romance My King) and Charlize Theron (the explosive Mad Max: Fury Road).