How Von Trier, who prides himself on being a cultural imp, dug this ditch and leapt into it would take more than a Tweet to explain why it exists in a long line of cultural imbecility on the world scene rather than absolute venality, and why it’s one more instance of not being able to trust the talent to act like grownups for more than 28 minutes. Actress Kirsten Dunst and co-star Charlotte Gainsbourg flanked Von Trier. Gainsbourg went blank, but Dunst, who snatched the Palme D’Or as best actress, let slip a there goes the ballgame eye roll.
Experienced Cannes press mostly dismissed his remarks as mental confetti but which this time blew back in his face. By getting himself plunked back in his van—he won’t fly—to hit the road, Von Trier, who is a past Palme D’Or winner here with Dancer in the Dark in 2000, acted out in some harmonic convergence between reality and fiction what was happening onscreen, anyway.
The films on display—many of which were underrated by the critics at Cannes, but which have a far better shot at finding an audience later-- were about loss of trust and bad faith. About the aftermath of institutions wrecking people—the elite as often as not—and the elite wrecking institutions. They were about jobs in a wrecked world. Who wanted them, and who didn’t. Jobs, jobs, jobs—the perfect expression of a social order that people used to be able to trust—were where the rubber hit the cinema road in Cannes this year.
The Cannes roundup:
When it finally gets around to its non-narrative, the Palme D’Or winning Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life is a sprawling tone poem that takes as its subject a typical 1950’s American family in a small Texas town, with Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain—both indelible in their roles--embodying the post-war O’Briens presiding over the American century.
There are tons of details from Mercurochrome on kids’ cuts, to gray Studebakers parked out front, to BB guns being a rite of 10 year-old passage. But then comes a bad telegram about one son, plunging the family into the doubts of Job, and Malick pulls back the skin to lay bare the fault in the American character: misplaced male authority grounded in misused Christian theology. The O’Briens live the American dream and it’s nightmares: life in Eden, death of a son, loss of Eden, the soullessness of work and money.
