Cannes got it wrong this year by awarding Palme d’Or to Cristian Mungiu’s very moderate Fjord

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Film about a couple on trial for child abuse isn’t a patch on the director’s previous Palme winner, while other disappointing films seemed to grab the jury’s attention These were the prizes for a Cannes under pressure. The Hollywood A-listers and big-hitters were A-listing and big-hitting at home this year. And what about the international heavyweights from Europe and Asia that highbrow festivaliers are always saying are loads better than the Americans anyway? Well, many of those only showed up in the physical sense. For me, most of the films from the accepted laureates and auteurs were very moderate, and I have to confess being sceptical about this year’s Palme d’Or, Fjord , by Romanian film-maker Cristian Mungiu (who won the Palme nearly 20 years ago with his searing abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days). Fjord is, in fact, a perfect example of an established European star director using a big Hollywood name: Sebastian Stan, playing a grumpy and religious Romanian IT engineer,...
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The Idiots review – Lars von Trier’s appalling-taste Dogme satire is irritatingly original

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Whether intended as a satire of bourgeois hypocrisy or not this tale of boorish nihilists announced von Trier as a consummate provocateur

Lars von Trier’s film from 1998 is re-released as part of the ongoing retrospective dedicated to this director, a film pioneeringly shot on digital video according to the minimalist guidelines of the Dogme 95 collective, which undoubtedly helped create an affordability-revolution in indie film-making. After a quarter of a century, The Idiots looks as cheerfully shallow, smug and manipulative as anything he has ever done, yet revisiting this needlingly insistent and epically tiresome film does bring into focus the way in which the debate around disability representation has changed, and also the subversive prank aesthetic that has to some degree governed the entire career of this unique film-maker.

The Idiots is about people playing tricks, gigglingly pretending to have cerebral palsy or some form of learning disability in order to freak out the uptight bourgeois in their restaurants and workplaces – and, of course, the cinema auditorium. They callously call it “spassing”, or use the English phrase “mentally retarded”. Karen (Bodil Jørgensen) is a deeply unhappy woman, in shock after a tragedy in her life which is explained only at the very end. Dining alone in a restaurant one day, she is intrigued at what appears to be a group of disabled adults there, minimally controlled by their carer and embarrassing the other diners, whose fastidious politeness prevents them from expressing their obvious disapproval and disgust. Karen goes back with these people to their house, where she finds they are simply pretending: a commune-cult led by the charismatic Stoffer (Jens Albinus) whose wealthy uncle owns their HQ and believes his nephew to be house-sitting the property prior to it being sold off.

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