“Crash” (1996)
It’s easy to see why general audiences stayed away in droves from David Cronenberg’s chilly, graphic and disturbing adaptation of J.G. Ballard‘s “Crash,” the story of a group of people (James Spader, Holly Hunter, Deborah Unger and Elias Koteas) who get sexually aroused by car crashes. But it’s less clear why the Cannes critics were so quick to jeer: sure, it features some icky sex, but if every Cannes film that featured a man fucking a leg wound got booed, everyone would have lost their voices by day 4 (ok, that’s an exaggeration, but explicit, weird sex is not in itself a cause for catcalls). It’s more likely it was a combination of the cerebral aspects of Cronenberg’s style, the alienating worldview of the book’s author and the slick, sick sheen to the filmmaking that had some critics, like Entertainment Weekly crying pretension and calling out what they saw as the film’s “cryptically morose art-porn postures.” Happily, Francis Ford Coppola’s jury saw it differently and awarded the film the Grand Jury Prize, and it has gone on to become a fixture on “best of the 1990s” lists —often from the very same publications whose initial reviews were so scathing.
“Only God Forgives” (2013)
In 2012, Nicolas Winding Refn turned a relatively run-of-the-mill actioner about an LA getaway driver into a neon-drenched, hyper-violent reverie, and thus “Drive” went on to huge success at Cannes, getting rave reviews, winning Best Director and instantly establishing itself as a classic of neon-noir. But nearly all of that goodwill dissipated when the director returned to the Croisette with “Only God Forgives.” The story of a taciturn heroin dealer (Ryan Gosling) who embarks on a vendetta at the behest of his mother (Kristin Scott-Thomas) after his gangster brother is slain increases the violence and stylization of “Drive,” but sadly also doubles down on its self-seriousness. The reaction was vicious (though we were a little milder): the film saw myriad walkouts well before the halfway mark —a reaction not dissimilar to that which greeted Gosling’s similarly styled but inarguably inferior directorial debut “Lost River” the following year. Refn’s response to the criticisms was strenuously dismissive: “great art… if it doesn’t divide, it doesn’t penetrate, and if it doesn’t penetrate, you just consume it.” We’ll see how forgiving Cannes critics are when Refn’s next film “The Neon Demon” debuts there next Thursday.
“Seconds” (1966)
If there’s a classic arc to the “booed in Cannes” narrative, it might trace exactly that of John Frankenheimer‘s now thoroughly rehabilitated sci-fi oddity “Seconds.” And it goes: celebrated American director (he was coming off a string of well-received titles including “The Manchurian Candidate” and the stunning “The Train“) comes to Cannes with a more experimental title, is booed and sees it flop commercially before the film becomes a cult favorite, is widely reevaluated and finally anointed as a bona fide classic (“Seconds” was released on Criterion in 2013). A paranoiac identity thriller/horror, “Seconds” stars an against-type Rock Hudson as a man who’s undergone a procedure to give him a new face and an entirely different life, but finds his sense of himself fraying as a result. It critiques the bourgeois mores of the time and ends with one of the most shatteringly bleak finales in movie history. So as Time Out put it, “little wonder it flopped at the time, only to be cherished by a later generation.” Even today, Cannes audiences are drowning in fare depicting white, male, middle-aged, middle-class malaise —back in the 1960s, this grim, unsettling tale of male midlife crisis must have seemed like an all-out frontal attack on the sensibilities of many of the attendees.
“Inglourious Basterds” (2009)
Boos were certainly reported at the premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Basterds,’ in which a team of renegade American GIs (led by Brad Pitt) scalp Nazis behind enemy lines in a fantastical version of World War II-era Occupied France. But the mists of time can easily obscure the true facts surrounding something so ephemeral —Anne Thompson, for one, suggested that it wasn’t booed at all, but suggested the reception was more one of indifference. The Hollywood Reporter noted that “things we think of as being Tarantino-esque…are largely missing, while British critics summed up the divide, with The Guardian awarding it a single star and calling it an “armor-plated turkey,” while the BBC marked it as “a glorious, silly, blood-splattered return to form.” Of course, Tarantino was used to the booing. “Pulp Fiction“‘s 1994 Palme d’Or win was jeered at by those who felt Krzysztof Kieslowski‘s “Three Colors: Red” should have won, and ‘Basterds,” like ‘Pulp,’ went on to do just fine for the director, taking more than $300 million worldwide and racking up eight Academy Award nominations. Given that track record, and the apparent absence of boos at the Cannes premiere of the definitely inferior “Death Proof,” expect the sound of press screening derision to be sweet to Tarantino’s ears.
“Post Tenebras Lux” (2012)
Mexican helmer Carlos Reygadas is one of the great Cannes discoveries of the 2000s, with 2002’s “Japón,” 2005’s “Battle In Heaven” and 2007’s Jury Prize-winning “Silent Light” all winning him acclaim from serious cinephiles (Scorsese is a fan) and drawing comparisons to Dreyer and Tarkovsky, among others. But while he has always been a little divisive, the helmer’s provocative, trippy style stretched the patience of some with his fourth film, 2012’s “Post Tenebras Lux.” Very loosely following a well-to-do family who’ve moved from the city to the countryside, the film almost entirely abandons narrative and takes a striking formal approach, with a refracted, blur-edged lens that made it feel like Emmanuel Lubezki after a severe blow to the head. Some were overjoyed —one viewer reportedly yelled “Viva Bunuel!” at the end of the screening— but as the New York Times reported, there were also “belligerent boos and hooting” when the film screened, and more than a few toxic reviews (“a congealed Jungian stew,” said The Guardian). Reygadas didn’t seem too bothered, though (“people here are tired, they’re paid to judge, and they think they have to judge before they feel,” he told the New York Times at the festival), and neither did Nanni Moretti’s jury, who gave him the Best Director prize.
That’s more than enough, but if you want more films that certain elements of the Cannes press corp decided to be vocally negative about, you could look to Fellini’s final film “The Voice Of The Moon,” Lars Von Trier’s sexually explicit “The Idiots,” Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Tropical Malady,” Wim Wenders’ “Palermo Shooting,” Jean Eustache’s “The Mother And The Whore,” or Bresson’s “L’Argent.”
Then there was also Dreyer’s “Gertrud,” Marco Ferreri’s “La Grande Bouffe,” Jane Campion’s debut “Sweetie,” and, more recently, Ryan Gosling’s “Lost River,” Gus Van Sant’s “Sea Of Trees” and 2014 opener “Grace Of Monaco,” a film that eventually found a U.S. audience as a Lifetime movie. Anything else? Shout it out in the comments.
Check out the rest of our coverage from the 2016 Cannes Film Festival by clicking here.
