Shocking Films at Cannes

The 69th annual Cannes Film Festival unfolded on the Riviera in May, and the jury this year, headed by George Miller (of Mad Max fame), picked some prize winners that elicited boos from audiences. Inspired by this, PROVOKR has recalled some of the most shocking films to play at festivals past. The six movies below opened at Cannes, some to huzzahs and some to Bronx cheers, but all of them discombobulated audiences in one way or another.

 

Antichrist (2009)

Director Lars von Trier has been a provocateur since his early career, when he helped institute the minimalist “Dogme” manifesto (eschewing artificial lighting, makeup, music tracks, digital effects) and directed such stylistically daring movies as Breaking the Waves and Dancing in the Dark. But he went beyond the pale with Antichrist, a horror movie starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, in which a couple retreats to a cabin in the woods to heal their marriage. Once there, things go satanically haywire, with lots of violent sex, and Gainsbourg smashing Dafoe’s testicles and drilling through his leg. She also performs a clitorectomy on herself before he kills her and burns her on a pyre. The debut screening had many walkouts and people fainting, and at the press conference the next day, von Trier declared himself to be the best director in the world. A religious jury at Cannes gave the film an “anti-award” for its misogyny, and it was variously released in different countries in cut and uncut versions.

 

Shortbus (2006)

Actor James Cameron Mitchell made a name for himself when he starred off-Broadway in a musical, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, about an East German transgender performer (the title refers to her severed penis), which he wrote himself. He eventually directed a movie version of Hedwig, and was then inspired to create this film, about an omnisexual crowd of arty New Yorkers, in which the sex acts performed by the actors were clearly unsimulated. The film premiered out-of-competition at Cannes, and received a mostly warm reception. But some truly out-there scenes, such as one in which a character fellates himself and another, a gay threesome, in which one man performs a humming rim job on another to the tune of the National Anthem, caused some to accuse the film of being porn. Cameron responded to this by saying that he felt the film was not intended to sexually arouse people, but its explicitness remained a controversy throughout its run.

 

The Brown Bunny (2003)

Like Lars von Trier, actor-director Vincent Gallo (Buffalo ’66) has always been prone to making statements about himself that sound like delusions of grandeur. This film by him, which premiered in competition at Cannes, contains a scene at the end in which he visits a former girlfriend, played by Chloë Sevigny, who visibly fellates his penis. The shock of the real was one thing, but the loosely structured two-hour version that screened at Cannes was savaged by critics, notably Roger Ebert, who dubbed it the worst film that ever played at the festival. Gallo reacted defensively to this, calling Ebert “a fat pig with the physique of a slave trader,” but he cut about 25 minutes of the film before its American release. Ebert re-reviewed the cut version and praised it, but the damage was done. The Daily Telegraph declared The Brown Betty to be the “most reviled” film of its decade.

 

Irreversible (2002)

The Argentinian director Gaspar Noé, who has mostly made his films in France, works hard to shock his audiences and mostly succeeds. This story of a horrific rape and the equally horrific act of vengeance that it provokes, is told in reverse, so the carnage comes first and the movie ends with an idyllic nude lovemaking scene between husband (Vincent Cassel) and wife (Monica Belluci). The effect is unsettling, to say the least, but the rape scene, which lasts several minutes in a long take in which the screams and humiliation of the female victim (Belluci) are front and center, caused many walkouts (mostly by women) at Cannes, where the film premiered in competition. In the film’s disorienting chronology, the rape is preceded by the husband’s raging response, in which Cassel follows the rapist into a gay club, and, mistaking the perpetrator for an innocent bystander, bashes that man’s head with a fire extinguisher, killing him. Newsweek‘s David Ansen noted the walkouts to the film and claimed that it displayed “an adolescent pride in its own ugliness.”

 

Viridiana (1961)

Spanish director Luis Buñuel started his career with the 1929 Surrealist short, Un Chien Andalou, created with his schoolmate Salvador Dalí, which begins with a woman’s eye being sliced open. Buñuel loved nothing better than to subvert the church and the privileged classes and his audience’s sense of propriety. This film, made in Spain after decades in exile in Mexico, is a story of blasphemy that knows no bounds. A young novice (Silvia Pinal) ready to take her vows as a nun is pushed into visiting her widowed uncle (Fernando Rey), a man who ends up dressing her in his late wife’s wedding dress, drugging her and attempting to rape her (the scene in the clip). Things descend from there, with a suicide, debauched parties by servants, and murder. The Spanish government, which submitted the film to Cannes (where it won the Palme d’or, the top prize), ended up banning the film, and the Catholic Church condemned it. Buñuel, sly as ever, later said that he “didn’t deliberately set out to be blasphemous, but then, Pope John XXIII is a better judge of such things than I am.”

 

La Dolce Vita (1960)

This epic Fellini romp, a satirical look at the spectacle of celebrities and high living, is now considered one of the greatest films of all time, and even when it opened at Cannes it delighted critics and won the Palme d’or. But Fellini’s indulgent observations of decadent behavior in modern Rome, with Marcello Mastroianni playing a gossip reporter and Anita Ekberg the actress whom he follows as she swims fully clothed in the Trevi Fountain, infuriated the Catholic Church, which saw it as a metaphorical mock of the Second Coming. Despite the cheers of cineastes, the film was banned in Spain (until Franco died) and censored in Italy and elsewhere. By today’s standards, it would barely clinch an R rating.