Which movie screening caused the biggest walkout in Cannes history?
Crowds at the Cannes Film Festival aren’t exactly known for being kind or gentle to movies they don’t enjoy. Despite the festival being the most prestigious in the world of cinema, a marquee event in the film calendar that only the best, brightest, and most glamorous can attend, it’s also the most demanding of its screenings.
Catcalling, hissing, booing, jeering, animal noises, and even spitting are not to be discounted mid-screening. Even the 2011 Palme d’Or winner, The Tree of Life, named by critic Roger Ebert as one of the ten greatest films of all time, faced jeers at its Cannes premiere. And Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie Megalopolis was initially booed as its screening this week came to an end.
But nothing marks a Cannes audience’s disgust with a film premiering at the festival like a walkout. In general, walkouts are a regular occurrence at Cannes. If people don’t like it they leave – it’s as simple as that. In 2022, Ruben Östlund’s eventual Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness saw many audience members walk out during a graphic vomiting scene. Most people stayed, though, and gave the film a warm eight-minute standing ovation when it finished.
However, some movies have suffered walkouts at Cannes screenings on a much larger scale. A couple of honourable mentions should go to 2005’s The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, a movie essentially about rape in such disgustingly poor taste it caused a stampede as people tried to leave the screening theatre. And to the 2015 3-D pornographic film Love, which led dozens of audience members to flee the screening as bodily secretions appeared to fly towards them.
The walkout you can’t undo?
Still, arguably, only four films have caused mass walkouts at Cannes in modern times, depending on which number of audience members to have left you draw the line at.
Two of the four are, of course, Lars von Trier creations. His 2009 effort Antichrist, in which Willem Dafoe appears to get off on female genital mutilation, saw a body count of at least 50 walkouts and several audience members actually passing out in horror. 2018’s The House That Jack Built offered more of the same, with a breast-mutilating scene sparking a walkout that reached the three-figure mark. American movie critic Roger Friedman called it a “vile” film that “should not have been made”.
Ironically, von Trier had only just been allowed back at Cannes after a seven-year ban for comments in 2011 claiming he understood Hitler and suggesting he himself was a Nazi. He took a break from filmmaking in 2022 after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, but we can’t rule out his return to shock Cannes punters at another festival in the future.
Just a year after The House That Jack Built appalled audiences, Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo by Abdellatif Kechiche caused another mass walkout at the 2019 festival. The three-and-a-half-hour buttfest features an extensive scene of unsimulated oral sex, which, like much of the rest of the film, seemed to serve no other purpose than to satisfy the director’s own perversions. And it proved too much for at least 70 audience members to sit through.
However, neither Kechiche nor von Trier (however hard he might try) can match the biggest walkout in the history of the Cannes Film Festival. This (dis)honour belongs to director Gaspar Noé, the man who would later be responsible for the flying semen at a 2015 screening.
His 2002 movie Irréversible flew the flag for French cinema on home territory by depicting a 10-minute-long rape scene that left the female victim in a coma. 250 people got up and left mid-screening, while 20 of them fainted. The fire brigade had to be called in, with their chief describing scenes in the movie as “unbearable”.
Nothing has yet surpassed this level of fallout from a Cannes screening. The festival has been very happy to welcome Noé back for screenings of every one of his films since Irréversible. And the three movies he’s made since 2015’s immersively pornographic Love have been received with relative calm and acclaim. Perhaps his lust for courting controversy at Cannes has subsided.
