There is a place more beautiful than you can imagine, where fame and wealth go yachting. Film titans flock to the French Riviera. Artists, celebrities, fashion, financiers. Bright stars, dark money. Red carpet, blue Mediterranean. The greatest directors, the grandest actors.
And then someone stares into the eyes of these demi-gods, and starts to boo.
I’ve never been to the Cannes Film Festival. I will never go. I have no expertise. Sometimes a veteran will declare the famously loud reactions are a put-on, or bad-faith posturing. When BAMcinématek hosted their “Booed at Cannes” series in May 2013, the lineup featured Michelangelo Antonioni, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Federico Fellini, and Luis Buñuel. Google’s favorite “Booed at Cannes” list is this encyclopedic IndieWire compilation, which includes Taxi Driver, The Tree of Life, and Personal Shopper.
All fodder if you think the booing is dunderheaded, or morally wrong. But I’m here for the bread and circuses. I love any grand temple of cinema that encourages slash-and-burn replies. Negativity is a vital part of film conversation; many of the booed features also earned standing ovations. In this case, the disapproval mostly punches up. In my head, the booers resemble Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Pierrot le Fou, punks on the road to self-immolation. We need more pranksters than priests.
This week, I went on the very excellent Screen Drafts podcast to draft a list of films booed at Cannes with the great Jordan Crucchiola. We pulled from a list of 33 projects released since 1990. This is the Modern Age of the Cannes Boo. The era belongs to relentless provocateurs like Lars Von Trier (four booed films), Gaspar Noé (two), and Nicolas Winding Refn (two). Some actors persist. Three movies with Nicole Kidman, two with Matthew McConaughey, three (rude!) with Eva Mendes. There are surreal ambiguities like 2004’s Tropical Malady and 2012’s Post Tenebras Lux, but also star-powered misfires. Hear Charlize Theron do her native South African accent in 2016’s aid sudser The Last Face. Hear Mel Gibson do, like, gangster Bri’ish 2011’s immortal The Beaver.
What brings out the booing? The films often feature graphic sex (unsimulated in 1998’s The Idiots and 2003’s The Brown Bunny). There is ultraviolence, assault, a literal blood bath in 2016’s The Neon Demon, and murdered children in, let’s see 2009’s Antichrist, 2013’s Only God Forgives, 2017’s The Killing of the Sacred Deer, 2018’s The House that Jack Built, and 2022’s Crimes of the Future. And if you watch everything on the long list, you will see every kind of genital get mutilated.
But I don’t think Cannes critics find extreme content distasteful. Pretension is the more serious crime. Brown Bunny’s experience at the festival was the Platonic Boo. Actor-director Vincent Gallo delivered a plotless meander about slowly crossing America, which climaxes with an actual blowjob. The press screening launched a war of words between the filmmaker and Roger Ebert. Their enmity resolved, and Ebert wound up liking a recut The Brown Bunny. Postscript: Gallo restarted the feud after Ebert was dead.
Brown Bunny is wild, boring, unique. Its handmade qualities strike me as unbearably poignant given how borgy most movies/humans got the next couple decades. I would never boo excess weirdness. My own kryptonite is glossy pro-aristocrat revisionism, which is why I never groove with 2006’s Marie Antoinette. Not unreasonable, though, to get upset when things make no sense. I love the slippery realities of 2012’s Holy Motors and 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and I don’t mind defending them from frustrated normalniks.
Still, when you watch Fellini’s 1990 swan song The Voice of the Moon, it’s obvious the maestro’s playful religio-erotic absurdity had long since aged to schtick. Only God Forgives is Refn’s abomination; it deserves a boo and a Red Bull thrown at the screen. I kind of love all Von Trier’s movies, but part of their appeal is their nervy edginess, the sense he’s trying hard to piss off somebody.
What lucky film will get booed this year? Sebastian Stan playing Donald Trump? Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone positively demanding an Icarus fall after their recent success? Francis Ford Coppola’s life opus? Imagine the Facebook posts from a heckled Paul Schrader!
From my faraway critical distance, the Cannes booing seems less like an attack than an invitation. Support, condemn, ignore: All feedback welcome. We would be sad if the booing went quiet. Godspeed, Cannes loudmouths. Enter the void. Dance in the dark. Kill some sacred deer.