Cannes looks beyond Hollywood as US film-makers mostly fail to make the grade

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The 79th edition of the influential festival boasts an auteur-heavy lineup – with one, very big, country conspicuous by its almost total absence Gillian Anderson and Cara Delevingne to hit Cannes as auteur heavyweights dominate festival lineup Has Europe fallen out of love with the US? Has Cannes fallen out of love with Hollywood? Will the festival, like Nato, become a non-American institution? Either way, the annual announcement of the Cannes selection has revealed a list that skews away from Hollywood towards a renewed dominance of world-cinema auteurs and heavy hitters, including Pedro Almodovar, Cristian Mungiu and Asghar Farhadi. There’s certainly nothing to compare with last year’s Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible extravaganza, although there are directorial debuts out of competition for Andy Garcia (also starring) with his crime drama Diamond, and John Travolta directs Propeller One-Way Night Coach, expressing his love of aviation, based on his own novel. There are no Britis...
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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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