Yes we Cannes

Nothing could be finer on this post-rapture Sunday morning than listening "en direct" to my friends at Le Masque et La Plume (France Inter, tous les dimanche soirs ) comment on this year's winners at Cannes.

They spent a few minutes reviewing the scandal created by Lars von Trier when he extricated himself from an unfortunate sentence about his recently discovered German roots by saying "Okay, I'm a Nazi". No scandal = no Cannes. Lars von Trier delivered this year. He said he was sorry, but it is kind of hard to recover from saying that you can kind of understand where Hitler was coming from. His apology just made things worse.
Frankly, I was tired of the whole damn thing before it was even over. Before Von Trier was kicked out of the festival. It's like he got a red card from the referee. Whatever. I am not a Nazi sympathizer by any means, and I think his comments were most unfortunate. I bet he thinks so too. The story is that his mother told him on her deathbed that his real father, not the Jewish man who raised him, was actually a German. I think that would throw just about anyone for a loop. The fact remains that his film, Melancholia, is unanimously deemed to be magnificent. Its female lead, Kirstin Dunst, got the palm for best actress. I'm going to refrain from getting embroiled in this debate or even commenting on it: he has made a magnificent film. That's all I have to say on the matter. If you are interested, you can watch a youtube video that shows Kirstin Dunst reacting with growing alarm as Von Trier tries to find a way out during the press conference. I find the whole thing painful.

Here's the trailer for Melancholia. It has a Robert Altman at his best feel to it.




The Palme d'or went to Terrence Malick this year for The Tree of Life, starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn. The trailer (below) looks like a life insurance commercial with a very dark underside:



See you at the movies.