CANNES, France – Winners of the 1999 Palme d’Or for “Rosetta,” the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have once again received the highest honor of the Cannes Film Festival. “The Child” may not be the best, but it is perhaps the most emblematic film in a festival pervaded by tales of familial anxiety and endangered children.

There’s no questioning the brothers’ mastery. Second to second, “The Child” is as focused a piece of filmmaking as their masterpiece, “The Son.” Hewing to their trademark style (a highly refined handheld verite) and returning once more to the bleak Belgian suburbs of their previous work, the Dardennes have crafted another terse, economic allegory about a young family on the margins of society.

Twenty-year-old Bruno (Jeremie Renier) ekes out a living through petty theft, but squanders every fresh dollar on instant gratification. His girlfriend Sonia (Deborah Francois) has just given birth to a baby boy. After introducing us to the characters and deftly establishing Bruno’s material (and spiritual) pathology, “The Child” triggers its audacious inciting incident: Bruno sells off his infant son on the adoption black market.

The crisis this precipitates in his relationship to Sonia and his own troubled soul forms the narrative trajectory of “The Child.” I had a very hard time believing that Bruno could so easily think of his child as just another commodity, and for all its brilliance of execution, the scenario felt disappointingly schematic. If “Rosetta,” as a critic once said, was the best Marxist remake of “Mouchette,” then “The Child” is a middling Marxist remake of “Pickpocket.”

Rumored to be the front-runner for the Palme d’Or, Jim Jarmusch’s enjoyable but slight “Broken Flowers” received the second-place Grand Prize. The theme, again, is paternity, with Bill Murray on a whimsical road trip to find his bastard son. There’s little to dislike here, with Mr. Jarmusch’s distinctive sense of timing as pleasurable as ever, but it’s a minor work from the maker of “Dead Man,” and another symptom of the epidemic solipsism in American independent cinema (cf. Miranda July’s Camera d’Or-winning “Me You and Everyone We Know”).

Accepting his award with a moving declaration of gratitude to Hou Hsiao-Hsien (“I am your student”), Mr. Jarmusch gave voice to something everyone’s been thinking about. “Thanks,” he said, “to this very strange jury.” It’s been anyone’s guess how the following luminaries, as crazy quilt a committee as you could think up, would judge the competition: Emir Kusturica (president), Nandita Das, Salma Hayek, Toni Morrison, Agnes Varda, Javier Barden, Fatih Akin, Benoit Jacquot, and John Woo.

Their most surprising move was the approval of Tommy Lee Jones’s “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.” Guillermo Arriaga, writer of “Amores Perros” and “21 Grams,” received the award for best screenplay, and Mr. Jones was judged the best actor. One of several quasi-Westerns in competition this year (including Wim Wenders’s “Don’t Come Knocking” and David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence”), “The Three Burials” takes a highly pretentious look at life in a Texas border town, then segues into a highly self-conscious genre picture.

Best actress winner Hanna Laslo was the best (and only) good thing in Amos Gitai’s pedantic “Free Zone,” and gave a moving speech dedicated to her mother, a Holocaust survivor. Maria Bello deserved the prize for her performance in “A History of Violence,” a film reportedly loathed by all but one jury member. Juliette Binoche might have won for her intense work in “Hidden,” the most widely acclaimed film in competition. The jury recognized instead its director, Michael Haneke.

The third place Jury Prize went to a film I skipped, Wang Xiaoshuai’s “Shanghai Dreams.” I know exactly one person who liked it, but all agree that if any Chinese film ought to have been recognized, it was Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s “Three Times.” This was the last film to screen in competition, and some have called it the best. The New York Times, notorious for its past dismissal of Mr. Hou’s greatest films, went on record declaring it a “masterpiece.”

By the time you read this, I’ll have seen it a second time. By the time it plays the New York Film Festival, I’ll feel qualified to discuss it at length. (Maybe the title is advice.) In these last, thoroughly exhausted hours of the Cannes Film Festival, when people ask what I made of the movie I simply leave it at this: No one should ever have to see a Hou film at 8 in the morning.

It’s not that this three-part love story starring the exquisite Shu Qi and the dashing Chang Chen is difficult to parse. Set in three eras (1911, 1966, and 2005), “Three Times” is one of Mr. Hou’s most relaxed and user-friendly narratives. But his contemplative sensibility requires full attention; the sublimity of his style a pair of rested eyes.

The Grand Prize in Un Certain Regard, the second-tier level of the festival programming, went to “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” a first-rate film from Romania. It was an ironic win in light of the widely reported scandal that Alexander Payne, president of the UCR jury, had walked out, only to be sent back by an outraged fellow jurist. But the irony stops there: Cristi Puiu’s tour de force was one of the very best films at Cannes this year.

Or so I realized once it became clear what he was up to, sometime around the one-hour mark of the lengthy runtime. Not that there’s any trick up the sleeve; “Death” is utterly guileless from first frame to last. Like the work of the Dardenne brothers, it is an exercise in obsessive verite that gradually and unobtrusively resonates with allegorical dimensions.

Unlike the familiar scenario of “The Child,” however, Mr. Puiu’s accumulation of incidents is wondrously organic and unpredictable. Veteran actor Ion Fiscuteanu stars as Lazarescu, a mess of a man afflicted by agonizing headaches and terrible stomach pains. Whether the diagnosis is acute alcoholism or something graver will generate slow burning suspense as the eponymous event draws near.

Set almost entirely in Lazarescu’s dingy apartment, most of the first hour is taken up by the effort of his neighbors to help him swallow medicine and make it to the hospital. Everything else is a Kafkaesque journey from hospital to hospital (a local traffic accident has taxed everyone’s resources, and the supercilious doctors are dismissive of his condition). In what feels like a single sustained movement in real time but covers around six hours, Mr. Puiu stages a kind of shallowspace mortality procedural.

Deep into “Death’s” immersive rhythms, I kept thinking about what Manny Farber would make of the film. “Death” is textbook termite art; a conceptually clear, circumscribed center of attention that burrows away at its own borders.

Two weeks, 40 movies, and several hundred espressos later, the only border I’m eager to burrow away at is the one separating Cannes, France from Brooklyn, N.Y.

WINNERS AT THE 58TH CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

Palme d’Or (Golden Palm)
“The Child,” Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Belgium)

Grand Prize
“Broken Flowers,” Jim Jarmusch (United States)

Jury Prize
“Shanghai Dreams,” Wang Xiaoshuai (China)

Best Director
Michael Haneke, “Hidden,” (Austria)

Best Actor
Tommy Lee Jones, “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (United States)

Best Actress
Hanna Laslo, “Free Zone” (Israel)

Best Screenplay
Guillermo Arriaga, “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (Mexican screenwriter, U.S. film)

Golden Camera (first-time director)
Miranda July, “Me and You and Everyone We Know” (United States) Vimukthi Jayasundara “The Forsaken Land” (Sri Lanka)

Best short film
“Wayfarers,” Igor Strembitskyy (Ukraine)