Rico's rants: Persona non grata cum idiot

20 May 2011

Persona non grata cum idiot

Rico says there's dumb and then there's really dumb:

In a shocking and unprecedented move, the Cannes Film Festival has declared Dutch director Lars Von Trier (Breaking the Waves; Dancer in the Dark) as persona non grata for remarks he made about his sympathies for Adolf Hitler. (Von Trier also rambled on about how he identifies with Jews.)

In The New York Times, Manohla Dargis has an article on the issue at Cannes:

The 64th Cannes Film Festival took a surreal turn when the festival’s board of directors announced that the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier had been declared persona non grata, the news erupting shortly before the latest movie from the now imprisoned Iranian director Jafar Panahi was shown.
The day before, answering a question about his German roots at the press conference for his latest, Melancholia, Mr. von Trier stunned the festival by announcing he was a Nazi. Flanked by his stars, Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Mr. von Trier started to talk and then to babble. He said he used to think he was Jewish and “was very happy being a Je..” But “then I found out I was really a Nazi because my family was German.”
He kept going, digging himself deeper and deeper as he went on, sometimes with a faint smile, about Jews, Israel, Nazis, Hitler, and the Nazi architect Albert Speer. An embarrassed-looking Ms. Dunst began shaking her head. “I am of course very much for Jews,” he tossed in. But he would not or perhaps could not shut up, even though he also seemed to know he should: “How can I get out of this sentence?” he asked. He finally ended this unbearable interval with a resigned little laugh and the disastrous words: “Okay, I’m a Nazi.”
I don’t believe Mr. von Trier is a Nazi; he’s just stupid and unthinking. Mr. von Trier, who apologized for his comments later, is an extremely awkward man who has always enjoyed playing the provocateur, riling up audiences and journalists who bait him. At the press conference here last year after the premiere of Antichrist, another calculated outrage, the first questioner demanded that Mr. von Trier justify why he had made that movie. This year, instead of supplying a provocation on screen, he turned his news conference into a sideshow, a freakishly self-destructive move. Anti-Semitic speech is illegal in France, and the board of directors at Cannes clearly felt it had no alternative but to ban Mr. von Trier.
Melancholia has no overt political content, unlike some of Mr. von Trier’s earlier films, including Dogville, which includes a crude critique of the United States (if one no more bluntly critical than that in, say, Michael Moore’s nonfiction movie Bowling for Columbine). Divided into several acts, including an overture that foreshadows the ensuing events, Melancholia centers on two sisters, Justine (Ms. Dunst) and Claire (Ms. Gainsbourg), who are facing the literal or perhaps metaphoric end of the world. Shot in digital, the movie’s initial, eerily beautiful images of a bride and several other figures, photographed in darkly contrasting color, strongly recall the dreamscapes of the American photographer Gregory Crewdson, who, in turn, has been influenced by David Lynch and Steven Spielberg.
After the overture— which includes a passage from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde that repeats throughout— Melancholia turns to the sisters. The long first act involves Justine’s marriage (her betrothed is played by Alexander Skarsgard, from the HBO show True Blood) and her sometimes funny, sometimes poignant encounters with her family, including her mother (Charlotte Rampling) and father (John Hurt). In the second act, the focus turns to Claire, whose wealthy husband (Kiefer Sutherland) is delighted that a meteor is about to pass (or not) Earth. In the production notes for Melancholia,Mr. von Trier says that Justine, who suffers from crippling depression, is very much a self-portrait: “She is based a lot on my person and my experiences with doomsday prophecies and depression.”