The Danish bad boy gets in hot water over Nazi comments as Cannes celebrates another vintage year, writes Séamas McSwiney
Cannes 2011 is widely held to be a classic vintage. As ever it hosted a broad spectrum of satisfying cinema, stylistically eclectic and as culturally diverse as the festival owes itself to be.
But there is something entertainingly aristocratic and arbitrary about Cannes, too. Why were certain films in competition and not others? Why did the jury opt for one combination of prizes and not another?
On the big prize night, top gongs were awarded to films from the US, Belgium, Turkey, Israel and France, with Terence Malick taking the Palme d’Or with The Tree of Life.
This film is a solemnly beautiful cinematic poem about the origins of life. It juxtaposes spectacular pre-historical images with an evocative exploration of family, memory and loss, as Jack (Sean Penn) casts his mind back to his boyhood with his brothers in 1950s Texas and his particularly fraught dialogue with his father, a disciplinarian by the name of Mr O’Brien (Brad Pitt).
Despite this particularly tantalising piece of Hollywood casting, Malick is no conventional multiplex filmmaker. He eschews story structure for dream-like evocation, and it is his enduring desire to capture an elusive and spiritual atmosphere that is his signature, setting him apart as a true cinematic author. This is why he is particularly admired in France.
As if to return the compliment, French film The Artist – for which lead Jean Dujardin scooped the Best Actor award – is a homage to the heyday of Hollywood, a silent movie in beautiful monochrome, and a totally enjoyable and simple tale of a Gene Kelly-type handsome hoofer who is confronted with the advent of talking pictures. Pure pleasure.
While Malick’s magestic opus explores the origins of humanity, Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia charts the end of the world. In an equally poetic and spectacular opening sequence, we see planet Earth obliterated by a much bigger star before tracking back a few days earlier, to a quite differently troubled family, and witness a classy but dysfunctional wedding and the contrastingly anxious personalities of two sisters, Justine and Claire, played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Von Trier courts controversy naturally and like no other, but usually it is calculated and has to do with his surprising filmmaking choices and strikingly ‘original’ observations.
This time the film itself did not overly upset anyone; rather, it was an unscripted stink bomb at the press conference. In a moment of ill-judged juvenile playfulness, Von Trier led himself into a rhetorical dead-end, an odd meander through his regrets at not being Jewish, and showing sympathy for a certain Mr Hitler. His fellow artists squirmed and Cannes spluttered as if choking on a bad glass of champers.
Just as the (now former) head of the IMF was languishing in a New York prison and Barack O’Bama was intent on resetting Israel’s 1967 borders, the Cannes board of directors was convened to declare bad-boy Von Trier persona non grata for his faux pas and forbade him from engaging in any further promotion of the film.
It was quite a state of affairs, and a veritable Cannes of worms had been opened. Was this a life sentence? It wasn’t clear. Was Melancholia, the film, also expunged from the competition? No, it wasn’t. Phew!
Von Trier, meanwhile, retreated to nearby Mougins and expressed contrition, echoed by his studio Zentropa. Something like resolution – though certainly not redemption, it’s much too early for that – happened when Kirsten Dunst picked up the best actress prize. In her speech, she acknowledged the unique moment of a Cannes prize. “It’s been quite a week”, she said.
Indeed it had been! Not least for its contradictions.
Stark, stylish and sad
Be Omid e Didar (Good Bye), an Iranian film in the Un Certain Regard section, also picked up an award. This film depicts a cruelly bureaucratic cat-and-mouse game that the regime is playing with a pregnant lawyer trying to leave the country. It is stark, stylish and sad.
The fact that its director Mohammad Rasoulof is under house arrest in Tehran only adds to the poignancy of this tragic truth-as-fiction tale.
In parallel, his colleague Jafar Panahi, who is undergoing similar persecution, was given a series of special prizes and tributes in Cannes this year. The festival has really upped its fight for free speech and against censorship and intolerance.
And in what some perceive to be an ironic artistic twist to the Nazi theme, Paolo Sorrentino’s wispily entertaining This Must Be the Place gives an oddly indulgent perspective.
Sean Penn plays a reclusive glam rocker, complete with makeup and hairdo, holed up in a Dublin mansion when he hears of his estranged father’s demise in America. Despite misgivings, he dutifully heads back Stateside to find himself in a trans-continental road movie hunting down the concentration camp guard his Auschwitz escapee father vowed to capture.
His ditzy perseverance wins through and the actual confrontation, far from vengeful, turns sweetly philosophical to the point of equating the prison guard’s sadness in looking at the blue sky with that of the concentration camp victim. It actually works in the context of the film, but when contrasted with the Von Trier narrative, it is perplexingly paradoxical.
Many would argue that Cannes invented Von Trier, and Von Trier exemplifies what is the essence of the show-art-business of Cannes. Metro Éireann’s Danish connections tell us that his next project is about female sexuality with suggestions of latent nymphomania. How can Cannes resist the promise of that? We’ll get the answer in about two years.
Séamas McSwiney is an Irish film journalist based in Paris.
