Belgian boos baffling Beauty

REEL NEWS:The first "boo" of Cannes is always something worth savouring. Your correspondent encountered this significant phenomenon at the screening of Julia Leigh's baffling, inappropriate Sleeping Beauty.

Featuring a more-wooden-than-balsa performance by Emily Browning as a teenage prostitute, the film ended to an icy silence followed by a guilty ripple of half-hearted applause. The Belgian man in front of me was not having it. Pulling himself up to a mighty height he put his back to the screen and loudly booed – or more accurately "mooed" – in the direction of the film's tepid supporters. Nobody joined in. But the clapping stopped.
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