A few days ago I commented that I sensed journalists and moviegoers weren't all talking about Lars von Trier's backhanded anti-Semitic comments during his press conference for "Melancholia." We weren't, really. It's the been the fallout: the festival's decision to deem him persona non grata; von Trier's ongoing, very public search for a shovel magical enough to get him out of this hole (he's quit drinking, he's not Mel Gibson, he's truly sorry)l the condemning statement released by Zentropa Films, von Trier's own production company; and the distancing objection of his younger, slicker countryman Nicolas Winding Refn, whose father has edited some of von Trier's movies and who is here with a better titillation ("Drive") than von Trier's, made in a country (the United States) that von Trier's fear of flying will always keep as an object of risible conjecture for him.
That, of course, is how von Trier managed to make one perceptive but generally loathed movie about America (2003's "Dogville") and one about American slavery ("Manderlay") that is simply imaginary. No matter how contrite he is, von Trier is a showman and provocateur who has a habit of burrowing himself beneath people's skin. For the Cannes Film Festival, his personal thoughts on Hitler, the Nazis, and Jews were particularly unwelcome -- the kind one censures -- because France is a country that takes talk of the Holocaust gravely seriously. Von Trier suggested as much in comments he allegedly made after the festival banned him.
The war, the Occupation, the Holocaust, not to mention the Resistance have shown up, to some extent, in all kinds of French movies ("Night & Fog," "Army of Shadows," "The Sorrow and the Pity," "The Last Metro," "The Story of Women," as a very short but very good beginning). A new one, "The Round Up," opened in France last year and comes to the Unites States this summer.
This year one of the strangest such movies is in the main competition. It's called "This Must Be the Place," it premiered yesterday, I saw it this morning, and while it's neither at all French -- its writer and director, Paolo Sorrentino, is a fanciful Italian visualist -- or set during the war, you can see why the festival felt compelled to invite it. It's the sort of quirky doodle that manages to back into the gravity of its subject matter and even then only partially, with one, late disturbing image. With all due respect to the misapplied talents of Sorrentino, the movie is also here because it stars Sean Penn. Penn wears a plume of teased black hair, white face paint, eyeliner, and lipstick that make him look like kabuki Jeff Spiccoli on Robert Smith night at Edward Scissorhands High.
