Lars von Trier’s Cannes return proves festival is still in thrall to male privilege
Time heals, particularly at the Cannes film festival, which has welcomed Danish director Lars von Trier back into its circle of celebrated auteurs, seven years after his ban for saying he sympathised with Hitler at a press conference. Then he was declared “persona non grata” but now, miraculously, he has become grata again, with his new film The House That Jack Built.
Like Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, Von Trier remains a favoured son of the most prestigious film festival in the world. The line that separates the art from the besmirched artist is never crossed at Cannes. The waves from the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, post-Harvey Weinstein, only seem to have caused minor ripples offshore while the party continues unabated on the Croisette.
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No effort has been spared to ensure Von Trier’s red-carpet comeback. Cannes’ artistic director Thierry Frémaux said the festival’s president, Pierre Lescure, had “worked hard” to change the Danish director’s status as persona non grata “in the belief that it was time to make a place for him again as a film-maker”.
With “F.U.C.K.” tattooed across his knuckles, Palme d’Or winner Von Trier is celebrated as a provocateur in life, and also on screen with films such as Nymphomaniac and Antichrist, the latter of which features Charlotte Gainsbourg scissoring off her own clitoris. But Von Trier’s remarks at the 2011 press conference for Melancholia went beyond provocation.
“I understand Hitler. But I think he did some wrong things, yes, absolutely, but I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end,” Von Trier said. “He’s not what you would call a good guy but I understand much about him, and I sympathise with him a little bit, yes. I’m not for the second world war, and I’m not against Jews – Susanne Bier, not even Susanne Bier – that was also a joke.” He rambled on, ending with a tribute to Hitler’s architect Albert Speer and the words: “OK, I’m a Nazi.”
I remember the tirade well, because I asked the question that sparked it, about Von Trier’s German roots and his declared admiration for the “Nazi aesthetic” in a Danish Film Institute magazine. It’s not the sort of question the press asks at Cannes; the male auteur is expected to be treated with reverence, and actors remain on their celebrity pedestals.
Von Trier makes his Hitler comments in response to Kate Muir’s question, while Kirsten Dunst looks on uncomfortably, at a press conference at Cannes in 2011. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters
When Woody Allen’s Cafe Society opened Cannes in 2016, not a single mention was made at the press conference of Ronan Farrow’s Hollywood Reporter piece the day before, in which his sister Dylan discussed her accusations of abuse against Allen. Instead we all chatted about the movie. (I asked Allen whether he could ever envisage making a film about a younger man and an older woman instead. “It’s a perfectly valid comic idea,” he answered.)
In the land of Simone de Beauvoir, women remain the second sex at Cannes. There’s much talk about inclusion. This year’s jury is headed by Cate Blanchett and includes four women and five men. But the 2018 film slate says it all: there are only three women directors out of the 21 in Competition this year (better than none at all in 2010 and 2005). This despite Frémaux declaring, “I’ve become much more concerned about the presence of women at the festival. I’ve been having discussions with intelligent women like Jessica Chastain and have listened to their advice.” That’s intelligent women. Not the other kind.
Indeed, it seems no one at Cannes remembers what Von Trier said about the Oscar-winning female director Susanne Bier (who is Jewish) during that notorious press conference. “The only thing I can tell you is that I thought I was a Jew for a long time and was very happy being a Jew, then later on came Susanne Bier and suddenly I wasn’t so happy about being a Jew.” Bier has never forgotten his “repulsive and stupid” remarks.
Meanwhile, since the #MeToo reckoning, there has been scrutiny of Von Trier’s Zentropa Studios, with nine female employees accusing his co-founder Peter Aalbaek Jensen of “sexual harassment, degradation and bullying”. Von Trier was also has also denied Björk’s allegations that he humiliated and sexually harassed her on set. And Von Trier revels in his controversial status. Indeed, at the photocall for Nymphomaniac at the Berlin film festival in 2014, Von Trier posed laughing in a black T-shirt emblazoned with the Cannes golden palm logo and the words “Persona Non Grata”.
Cannes is making a powerful statement about its ethics by bestowing prodigal son status on Von Trier after all this. And don’t be fooled by the festival’s declaration that only genius matters when films are chosen. How come, then, Weinstein’s one-star turkey Grace of Monaco was picked to open the festival a few years ago?
But Cannes could take a lead here, and instead it is staring down with patrician disdain, unchanging. In a year in which the whole movie industry has looked hard at itself, and found much wanting, Cannes has remained wilfully blind.