Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier who returned to the Cannes International Film Festival with his crime thriller story of a psychopath titled The House That Jack Built may not have expected this. The film which was screened in the out-of-competition section at the festival was welcomed with audience feeling disgusted, repulsive and finally hundred walking out from the theatre in the middle of the movie, reported The Guardian.
A BBC report suggests that Trier who made a controversial statement on Nazi dictator Hitler that “he’s not what you would call a good guy but I understand him. I sympathise with him a little bit” was banned from the festival in 2011 and since then he didn’t appear in any festival. But this time at Cannes, the audience was worn down from a filthy experience. People booed and were furious at the filmmaker for treating cinema like this.
However, this is not the first time Trier received such a welcome. His 2009 film Antichrist almost received a similar kind of treatment as audience walked out while the film was rolling.
But the culture of booing and the audience walking out is not a new tradition at Cannes. And not just bad movies.
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“Sometimes the booing reflects duds by broad consensus. But in other cases, the film, good or bad, is simply provocative, too much to digest for audiences whose tastes run the gamut,” writes Nicolas Rapold for The New York Times.
Classic examples are David Lynch’s Wild At Heart, Martin Scorsese’s Palme d’Or Winner Taxi Driver and another Palme d’Or winner Tree of Life by Terrance Mallick, which were all received first with unpleasant smiles. The ugly ones like Gasper Noe’s Love, Kim Ki Duk’s Aisle were not spared from boos either.
But coming back to Trier’s obnoxious masterpiece, The House That Jack Built, has Matt Dillion as a devil whisperer going on with his killing spree as he finds it self-satisfying. At one point in the trailer, the scene suggests that it’s a bit autobiographical for Lars Von Trier to tell his inner desires through this movie as a monologue goes like, “The atrocities that we commit in our fiction are those inner desires we cannot commit in our controlled civilisation, so they are expressed through our Art”, doesn’t it sound quite autobiographical?