The Palme d’Or-winning movie the Coen brothers couldn’t stand: “I barely sat through it”
Just because the Coen brothers have spent most of their careers making movies that aren’t necessarily designed to appeal to the mainstream, it doesn’t mean that they’re obligated to fawn over other movies that aren’t necessarily designed to appeal to the mainstream.
Not even ones that win the Palme d’Or, apparently, since one of them proved such a slog that Joel and Ethan could barely bring themselves to stick it out until the end credits. Of course, the Cannes Film Festival has become increasingly synonymous with walkouts, so it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary.
However, you can bet that it would have generated headlines had a pair of modern cinema’s most acclaimed auteurs gotten up and left before the end of a film, and not just any film, either, but the one that was awarded the most prestigious and vaunted accolade of the entire festival.
No stranger to Cannes, having claimed the Palme d’Or themselves for Barton Fink and been nominated a further seven times, the Coens are regular fixtures on the Croisette, and as a result, they’ve been exposed to the good, the bad, and the ugly, whether it’s movies screening inside or outside of competition.
One of them was a particular slog, with Joel laying his cards on the table when his brother made it perfectly clear that emotional reactions to movies weren’t their bag. “I hate when people cry in movies,” Ethan confessed. “It’s particularly disconcerting when you’re sitting at a really awful movie, and you hear people all around you sobbing and blowing their noses.”
As it happened, the older Coen had the perfect example to illustrate their point. “I cried during Dancer in the Dark,” Joel said, before revealing that he was kidding. “Actually, I barely sat through it. I hate to say this, but the best part of the movie was when Björk beat David Morse to death with a metal box.”
The final instalment in Lars Von Trier’s ‘Golden Heart’ trilogy won the Palme d’Or in 2000, with Björk taking home the ‘Best Actress’ prize for her heart-wrenching performance as Selma Ježková, a Czech immigrant and factory worker saving money to fund an operation in the hopes that her son won’t inherit the degenerative eye condition that’s slowly robbing her of her sight.
Björk does indeed beat David Morse to death with a metal box, but only after she’s accidentally shot him after discovering he’d stolen her life savings, and after she shoots him a couple more times without inflicting a mortal wound due to her poor eyesight, too. As far as the Coens are concerned, that’s where Dancer in the Dark peaked.
Like almost all of Von Trier’s work, the psychological genre-bender isn’t for everybody, and while the Cannes jury was convinced that it was worthy of the festival’s highest honour, Joel and Ethan disagreed.
