NEWS. . . BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT
While the year of the 77th Cannes Film Festival ends with a star-studded final ceremony, culminating in the awarding of the prestigious Palme d’Or, the 2024 edition has its share of poignant moments.
There’s Emma Stone, who cut off her finger and engaged in organizational sex in Kinds of Kindness, Francis Ford Coppola’s confusing, perhaps terrible, Megalopolis, and Demi Moore’s horrific bloody setting, The Substance.
We’ve also noticed that David Cronenberg brings decomposing corpses to the fore in The Shrouds and director Ali Abbasi presents his Donald Trump biopic with an open offer to screen it and then talk about it with his subject, even if it includes a scene showing alleged non-consensual sex.
Cannes is no stranger to drama, however, as it has encouraged strikes (Kinds of Kindness) and tested the limits of people’s ability to create vomit-inducing content (The Substance) several times over the years.
We have not yet touched on some of the outrageous things that are said and done on the Croisette for the sake of publicity.
So, with further ado, here’s a look at some of the wacky and debatable titles Cannes has spawned since its debut in 1946.
You’d think that seeing stars like Stone, Moore, and Diane Kruger ditch their clothes in 2024 was unusual.
However, Cannes had a great deal of public excitement with the nipples uncovered 70 years earlier, thanks to the publicity-hungry actress Simone Silva.
The young star was looking to make a splash at the festival and opted to do so by taking off her sexiest clothes for photographers while posing with Hollywood’s Robert Mitchum, who didn’t expect her to rip off his breasts. Some recent sources say he was horrified, while others say he played the game of stunts.
Silva had just been crowned “Miss Festival” and the Egyptian-born French actress told Ohio newspaper The Daily Reporter (via CNN): “The photographers got down on their knees begging me to take off my blouse.
He reported that in the resulting combat to photograph her, 3 photographers fell into the Mediterranean, while others were wounded, in addition to their damaged limbs.
The festival did not, however, inspire his behavior, especially since the photographs were published internationally and he asked to leave.
Strikes by festival staff were threatened and seemed imminent this year before they subsided, but during 1968 France was mired in strikes by national staff.
As academics marched through the streets in solidarity, an organization of New Wave filmmakers, led by Frenchmen Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, demanded the cancellation of the Cannes Film Festival in solidarity following violent clashes in Paris with police.
They felt that the glamour of the festival was completely out of step with what is happening in other parts of the country.
On May 18, the film Peppermint Frappé by director Carlos Saura was scheduled to be screened, but he and lead actress Geraldine Chaplin, also his friend and daughter of Charlie Chaplin, raised the level in an attempt to interrupt the screening, clinging to the velvet curtains to prevent them from opening.
They bonded through Truffaut and Godard before an argument and then a physical combat broke out with viewers looking to see the film (Chaplin is said to have lost a tooth).
The next day, the festival was cancelled five days early, no prizes were handed out, and Truffaut – who was blamed for all this – declared himself persona non grata (he had already been banned in 1958 as a critic and returned the following year) and won the Best Award. Director’s Award).
Not all of the winners are highly regarded by critics, as the film festival’s jury, chaired this year by Barbie director Greta Gerwig, is in charge of awarding the awards.
Despite being a cult crop that inspires many enthusiasts and filmmakers alike, Pulp Fiction was greeted with boos when it won Cannes’ most sensible prize, the Palme d’Or, 30 years ago.
The same thing happened to Martin Scorsese when Taxi Driver won just about 20 years earlier, a film now a masterpiece.
However, Tarantino wasn’t going to let the foul show pass without some sort of comment, so he simply turned to the audience and pointed a middle finger at them.
It seems like it’s a fabrication, but it’s also an inexplicably British joke.
24 Hour Party People, a 2002 film by Michael Winterbottom about the Manchester music scene from 1976 to 1992, featuring bands such as New Order, Joy Division and Happy Mondays.
It has a confident cast of British talent, joined by Steve Coogan, Andy Serkis, Shirley Henderson, John Simm, Paddy Considine, Peter Kay, Rob Brydon and Simon Pegg.
Unfortunately, some of them got caught on the wrong side of the Hotel Barrière Le Majestic Cannes when they attacked each other with full pigeons at their exclusive Bevery One club, as a stunt of exposure.
After showering diners with “fake blood and worse,” they were expelled, along with the British covering the waterfall.
Danny Cunningham, who plays Happy Mondays singer Shaun Ryder in the film and was reportedly injured in the fight, said at the time that Ryder “would have been proud of us. “
“We came to Cannes to be wild and now we’re going home,” he told the BBC at the time.
To get the context they desperately need, the actors revisited a real-life incident in which a young Ryder allegedly poisoned 3,000 pigeons with crack cocaine in Manchester.
Let’s move on to something more poignant with Irreversible in 2002, by French filmmaker Gaspar Noé.
The highly debatable film, starring Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel, included a 10-minute rape scene that left her victim in a coma.
He also defended critics and his audience, with more than two hundred more people coming out in the middle of the screening.
As a result, another 20 people allegedly fainted or “suffered nervous breakdowns,” and firefighters were called in to administer oxygen.
The head of the brigade even described the scenes as “unbearable” to AFP (via Le Parisien).
Noé and his actors were also confronted by an angry spectator, who shouted at them: “It’s a horror, you’ve never made a film like this. It’s terrible for other people who have experienced violence. That’s not what cinema is all about. ”
It’s possible that Lars von Trier has an entire article all to himself, covering the controversies he sparked at Cannes.
We will talk, however, about the most notorious, which is when he jokingly declared himself a Nazi after claiming that he sympathized with Hitler.
Responding to a question at his press conference about how his German roots influenced his film Melancholia, von Trier explained that he thought he “had been Jewish for a long time and was very satisfied to be Jewish” before later stating that he had discovered that he was “really a Nazi, which also left me satisfied. “
I think he did bad things, yes, absolutely, but I can see him sitting in his bunker at the end. I think I’m this man,” von Trier said, sitting next to his horrified actresses, Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg. .
Then he added: “How can I get rid of this sentence?Well, I’m a Nazi.
His comments were temporarily praised throughout the festival, with the director later apologizing and insisting that he is “in no way anti-Semitic or racist, nor am I a Nazi. “
However, they banned it for seven years before returning with the mental horror that divides The House Jack Built.
This controversy began in 2015 when several women were excluded from the red carpet of Todd Haynes’ Carol for violating the dress code.
His obvious crime? They were dressed in high heels.
Although festival organizers were quick to announce that this was not an official rule due to strict dress requirements, many feathers were in an uproar.
A few years later, jury member Kristen Stewart insisted on coming to a complete stop halfway down the red carpet in front of the Palace in 2018, before walking barefoot the rest of the way.
In 2023, Jennifer Lawrence also walked the carpet in flip-flops; He later clarified that this was due to a wardrobe factor rather than his preference for making a political statement.
Natalie Portman contented herself with making a direct reference to the dress code last year, telling Metro. co. uk and other media outlets that at the Cannes Film Festival women were expected to “exercise their femininity. “
“The other tactics that we as women have to behave at this festival, even in front of men. . . how we should look, how we should behave,” he observed.
“The expectations are different from you. They affect your behavior, whether you accept them, reject them, or do something in between. It is explained to you through the social structures that are imposed on you.
While it turns out that everyone is behaving pretty well (or blandly, depending on your point of view) this year, on-screen videos still got attention.
As an homage to a slew of complicated and divisive films of 2024, we didn’t forget about Coppola’s confusing $120,000,000 comeback film, Megalopolis, which features everything from a Jon Voight “erection” to a live performance. It was also the only song this year. to see loud boos combined with applause from critics and audiences.
There wasn’t just one, but two cinematic gang-bangs thanks to Kinds of Kindness and The Apprentice, and three films related to the addition of amputated hands (Kinds of Kindness, The Shrouds, and Emilia Perez).
And Demi Moore’s horrific transformation in The Substance is something that has to be noticed to be believed, as is the amount of blood and internal organs that splatter into director Coralie Fargeat’s film.
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