Even the most critically derided movies at Cannes this week found some supporters. Danish director Lars von Trier's wretched Antichrist(reviewed in The Irish Timeslast Tuesday) triggered much jeering and unintended laughter at its festival press screening.
It received just one star each from seven of the 10 critics polled by Screen International, but the Danish reviewer on the panel, Bo Green Jensen, gave it the full four stars, and Sight & Sound editor Nick James gave it three.
International distributors who had contemplated acquiring Antichristmay well be deterred by the early trade media reviews. Variety chief critic began his by saying, "Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with Antichrist". He added that it "may prove a a great date movie for pain-is-pleasure couples".
In Screen International, Jonathan Romney noted that "von Trier must have been feeling neglected because he goes all out for attention" with "this bizarre, increasingly hysterical melodrama".
Undaunted, von Trier faced the press the next day and declared, “I’m the best film director in the world.”
Challenged to explain and justify his explicitly gory scenes of genital mutilation, von Trier responded: “I don’t have to explain anything. You are all my guests here, not the other way round. Anyhow, I don’t think about the audience when I make a film. I don’t care. I make films for myself.”
