It started out as a festival dominated by the return of Terrence Malick, turned into a festival hijacked by the mouth of Lars von Trier, and ended up celebrating Malick.
It screened about 50 movies in various official capacities, while buyers hawked 4,000 more in an adjacent marketplace devoted as much to schlock than art.
And it proved to be a fertile ground for deals, even though the commercial chances for most of the films that screened at the festival are minimal.
(Photo of jury president Robert De Niro flanked by acting winners Kirsten Dunst and Jean Dujardin by Paschal Le Segretain/Getty Images)
The 64th Cannes Film Festival, which ended Sunday night in France with an awards ceremony that crowned "The Tree of Life" the Palme d'Or champ, followed by a screening of Christophe Honore's film "Beloved," was 12 days of cinema and controversy, an almost-fortnight that taught Cannes-goers and festival observers a few things.
To tell you the truth, we already knew most of these things. But they were reinforced in Cannes over the past two weeks. To recap:
1. Lars von Trier is a stupid loudmouth (who makes good movies).
Let's face it: the problem is not that von Trier is a Nazi, because he's not. The problem is that he approaches press conferences with provocation and mockery in mind, and his default setting is a kind of deadpan facetiousness in which he makes outrageous statements that we're supposed to know not to take seriously.
(Photo of von Trier with festival chief Thierry Fremaux by Georges DeKeerle/Getty Images)
You can get away with that approach, I suppose, when you take the fact that you're interested in making a soft-core porn movie (which von Trier apparently is) and inflate it to the point where you claim to be making a four-hour, hard-core porno with Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
It becomes a little more problematic when, with your actors sitting beside you, you imply that Stellan Skarsgard and the absent Kiefer Sutherland are drunks and that Dunst suffers from depression.
And it turns completely untenable when "I found out I had German, not Jewish ancestry" turns into "I'm a Nazi," and leads into a discussion of how you understand and, oops, sympathize with Hitler.
Anybody who saw the brilliant German film "Downfall," as von Trier said he did, could legitimately claim to take away some understanding of (if not sympathy for) Hitler. And plenty of artists drawn to the dark side, as von Trier is, have talked about finding the monsters within themselves in their work.
But digging yourself a hole with an ill-conceived and entirely unconsidered monologue, delivered in what isn't your first language, and then thinking you can squirm out of it with a flippant "Okay, I'm a Nazi," is just plain idiotic.
