CANNES, FRANCE — His hallucinatory horror film "Antichrist" elicited derisive giggles and howls from an irate media audience. Later, he was booed at his own news conference. But Lars von Trier is insisting, as he so often does, that he never intended to play the provocateur.
"If somebody asked me to make a provoking film, I wouldn't know how to do it," Von Trier said in an interview at the Hotel du Cap, a luxury resort up the coast from the bustle of the Croisette. "I didn't expect it but there's been a lot of hostility. It seems the film kind of gets to people somehow."
That would be an understatement. Sunday night's media screening of the Danish master prankster's "Antichrist" offered electrifying proof, as if more were needed, that he knows how to get a reaction. Laughter greeted the opening titles ("Lars von Trier Antichrist") as well as the punch line, a brazenly incongruous dedication to the late Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky.
A crescendoing shriek of psychosexual guilt and anxiety -- starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a bereft couple who retreat to a remote cabin in the woods -- the movie was met with guffaws and gasps, not least for a pair of instantly notorious scenes in which gruesome fates befall the characters' genitalia. As the credits rolled, jeers erupted along with applause.
Von Trier, 53, has been a Cannes fixture as long as he has been making movies. Except for 2006's "The Boss of It All," all of his features have premiered here, and he won the Palme d'Or in 2000 for "Dancer in the Dark." Two years ago, to mark its 60th anniversary, the festival invited more than 30 directors to make a short about the film-going experience. Von Trier's was set at the Cannes premiere of 2005's "Manderlay." A critic regales the man next to him, who happens to be Von Trier, with tedious banalities. When he finally asks his seatmate what he does for a living, the director responds, "I kill." He then produces a hammer and bludgeons the man to death.
Does that wry little skit sum up Von Trier's feelings about critics and Cannes? He laughed: "On some level," he said. "But the festival has been very, very kind to me." Accordingly he makes the effort to get here. Because of his well-documented fear of flying, he has never been to the United States, even though several of his films, including "Antichrist," are set there -- and travels to Cannes by camper van from Denmark. While here, he remains holed up at the du Cap, only venturing into the maw of the festival for his official screening and conference.
