Danish Lars von Trier is a great filmmaker. He’s also as inept a masochist as he is a humorist. Von Trier’s snarky comment “Okay, I’m a Nazi,” made during his press conference in Cannes in support of his competing movie “Melancholia,” was delivered with a heavy dose of grandstanding irony that doesn’t translate well on paper. It was as if he was saying, yeah, and I’m a mass murderer too, as a way of putting a cherry on a fallen cake. It wasn’t a smart way to wrap up his attempt at being entertaining. He basically fed himself to the wolves. To watch Kirsten Dunst sitting next to him trying to stop him with harsh looks and even a whispered request, as he digs himself into pit of idiocy, is as squirm-inducing as von Trier’s outlandish comments. His statements about empathizing with Hitler as he sat in his bunker proved a self-fulfilling prophecy. Von Trier blamed his “stupid” behavior on his recent return to sobriety and a “perverse need to please.”
The Cannes Festival board of directors took quick steps to extract an apology from von Trier before kicking him out of the festival as a persona non grata. If “Melancholia” had won the Palme d’or over Terrence Malick’s winning “Tree of Life,” boy would there have been a hurricane of journalists going wild. It’s interesting to see what makes the media go ballistic in an era when there’s 25% unemployment in America and Mother Nature is taking out wide swaths of the planet every other week.
Von Trier says he’s proud to be persona non grata and that he won’t be doing anymore press conferences in the future. As von Trier did with the self-imposed limitations of his influential “Dogma 95” film theory, he has placed himself in a kind of exile. One thing you can bet on is that his films will be as interesting and controversial as ever. Now he really can empathize with Hitler in his bunker.
