A dead pigeon fight, fainting fits and other mad Cannes Film Festival scandals-Tori Brazier-Entertainment – Metro

Cannes Film Festival has courted quite a few controversies over its decades of dazzling (Picture: Getty)

As the 77th Cannes Film Festival finishes for the year today with a star-studded closing ceremony, culminating in the awarding of the prestigious Palme d’Or, the 2024 edition has given us its fair share of shocking moments.

There’s been Emma Stone chopping off her finger and participating in group sex in Kinds of Kindness, Francis Ford Coppola’s baffling, possibly terrible, Megalopolis, and Demi Moore’s gruesomely gory body horror The Substance.

We’ve also seen David Cronenberg putting decaying corpses front and centre in The Shrouds and director Ali Abbasi unveiling his Donald Trump biopic with an open offer to screen and discuss it afterwards with its subject – even though it includes a scene depicting alleged non-consensual sex.

Cannes is no stranger to drama though, having inspired walkouts (Kinds of Kindness) and tested the limits of people’s capacity for vomit-triggering content (The Substance) several times before over the years.

We haven’t even touched on some of the outrageous things said and done on the Croisette in the name of publicity yet either.

So without delay, here’s a look at some of the bonkers and controversial headlines Cannes has been generating since it began in 1946.

French starlet’s topless pose causes injury (1954)

Simone Silva was keen to launch her career in Cannes (Picture: Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

You might think seeing stars like Stone, Moore and Diane Kruger shedding their clothes in 2024 was quite unusual.

However, Cannes had a very public brush with nipple-baring 70 years earlier, thanks to publicity-hungry actress Simone Silva.

The starlet was keen to make a splash at the festival and opted to do so by taking off her top for photographers when she was posing with Hollywood’s Robert Mitchum – who was not expecting her to whip her breasts out. Some contemporary sources say he was horrified, while others say he played along with the stunt.

Silva had just been crowned ‘Miss Festival’ and the Egyptian-born French actress told Ohio newspaper The Daily Reporter (via CNN): ‘The photographers got down on their knees to plead with me to take the top off.’

She whipped off her top while posing with Robert Mitchum (Picture: Keystone/Getty)

It’s reported that in the subsequent scuffle to snap her, three photographers fell into the Mediterranean, while others sustained injuries including broken limbs.

The festival was unimpressed by her behaviour though, especially as the photographs were published worldwide, and she was asked to leave.

François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard lead protestors demanding festival’s cancellation (1968)

Strikes from festival workers were threatened and looked imminent this year before going quiet, but back in 1968 France was in the grip of nationwide workers’ strikes.

With students marching in the streets in solidarity, a group of New Wave filmmakers, led by France’s own Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, demanded the Cannes Film Festival be called off in solidarity following violent clashes in Paris with the police.

Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut (2nd and C) caused a stir when they supported a cancellation of Cannes in 1968 (Picture: Gilbert Tourte/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

They felt the festival’s glamour was grossly out of step with that was happening elsewhere in the country.

On May 18, director Carlos Saura’s film Peppermint Frappé was due to be screened but he and leading lady Geraldine Chaplin, also his girlfriend and daughter to Charlie Chaplin, jumped on stage to try and disrupt the screening, hanging on to the velvet curtains to stop them from opening.

They were joined in this by Truffaut and Godard before an argument and then physical fight broke out with the people in the audience who did want to watch the film (Chaplin is rumoured to have lost a tooth).

The following day, the festival was cancelled five days early, no prizes were awarded and Truffaut – who was blamed for it all – was declared persona non grata (he’d already previously been banned in 1958 as a critic only to return the next year and scoop the best director prize).

Quentin Tarantino gives audience the finger(1994)

Director Quentin Tarantino was going to have the last word (or gesture) (Picture: Patrick Hertzog/AFP via Getty Images)

Not every winner is a popular choice with critics, as the film festival’s jury – this year lead by Barbie director Greta Gerwig – is in charge of handing out the prizes.

Although it’s gone on to become a cult classic that inspires many fans and filmmakers alike, Pulp Fiction was greeted with boos when it scooped Cannes’ top prize of the Palm D’Or 30 years ago.

The same thing had happened to Martin Scorsese when Taxi Driver won nearly 20 years earlier, a movie now considered a masterpiece.

However, Tarantino was not going to let the show of lack of support go without some form of comment. So he simply turned back around to the audience and stuck his middle finger up at them. 

24 Hour Party People cast attack each other with dead pigeons (2001)

Danny Cunningham (C) and 24 Hour Party People castmates after their fight (Picture: Alamy Stock)

It sounds like it’s been made up, while also being an inexplicably British gag.

24 Hour Party People, the 2002 Michael Winterbottom film about Manchester’s musical scene from 1976 until 1992, looked at bands such as New Order, Joy Division and Happy Mondays.

It boasts an absolutely stacked cast of British talent, including Steve Coogan, Andy Serkis, Shirley Henderson, John Simm, Paddy Considine, Peter Kay, Rob Brydon and Simon Pegg.

Unfortunately, some of them got on the wrong side of Hôtel Barrière Le Majestic Cannes when they decided to start attacking one another with prop stuffed pigeons in its exclusive beach club, as a publicity stunt.

After covering diners in ‘fake blood and worse’, they were ejected, alongside the British journalists covering the stunt.

Danny Cunningham, who plays Happy Mondays lead singer Shaun Ryder in the film and was reportedly injured in the fight, claimed at the time that the thought Ryder ‘would have been proud of us’.

‘We came to Cannes to be wild and now we are going home,’ he added to the BBC at the time.

To add the context so desperately needed, the actors were inspired by a real-life incident where a young Ryder is alleged to have poisoned 3,000 pigeons in Manchester with crack cocaine.

Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible sparks fainting fits and walkouts (2002)

There have been several walkouts in Cannes history, but none matches that of Irréversible (Picture: Studio Canal+/Kobal/Shutterstock)

On to something more starkly upsetting with Irréversible in 2002, from French filmmaker Gaspar Noé.

The extremely controversial film, starring Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel, included a 10-minute rape scene so shocking it left its female victim in a coma.

It also repulsed critics and its audience, with more than 200 people walking out mid-screening.

A further 20 were said to have fainted or ‘suffered nervous breakdowns’ as a result, with the fire brigade called to administer oxygen.

The brigade’s chief even described the scenes as ‘unbearable’ to AFP (via Le Parisien). 

Noé and his actors were also confronted by an angry audience member, who shouted at them: ‘It’s a horror, you should never have made a film like that. It’s terrible for people who have suffered violence. Cinema is not that.’ 

Lars von Trier declares himself ‘a Nazi’ (2011)

One of the most infamous controversies in the history of Cannes belongs to Lars von Trier – and a few others too (Picture: Getty)

Lars von Trier could have an entire article to himself, covering the multiple controversies he’s kicked up at Cannes.

We’ll discuss the most infamous though, which is when he apparently jokingly declared himself a Nazi after saying he sympathised with Hitler.

Answering a question on how his German roots influenced his film Melancholia at is press conference, von Trier explained that he had thought he ‘was a Jew for a very long time and was very happy being a Jew’ before later claiming he found out he was ‘really a Nazi, which also gave me some pleasure’.

‘I understand Hitler. I think he did some wrong things, yes absolutely, but I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end. I think I understand the man,’ von Trier commented, while sitting next to his horrified actors, Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

He then later added: ‘How do I get out of this sentence? OK, I’m a Nazi.’

His remarks were swiftly commended by the festival with the director later issuing his own apology and insisting he was ‘not antisemitic or racially prejudiced in any way, nor am I a Nazi’.

However, he was banned for seven years before returning with the divisive psychological horror The House That Jack Built.

High heel dress code protests (2015 – )

Cannes is known to have a dress code, which Kristen Stewart was happy to protest (Picture: Valery Hache/AFP via Getty Images)

This controversy kicked off in 2015 when multiple women were rejected from the red carpet for Todd Haynes’ Carol for not adhering to the dress code.

Their apparent crime? They were not wearing high heels.

Although festival organisers quickly announced that this was not an official rule in its pretty strict clothing requirements, many feathers were ruffled.

A few years later, jury member Kristen Stewart made a point of stopping halfway along the red carpet outside the Palais in 2018 to remove her heels entirely, before walking the rest of the way barefoot.

In 2023, Jennifer Lawrence also walked the carpet in flip-flops, although she later clarified that this was due to a wardrobe issue rather than her desire to make a political statement.

Jennifer Lawrence wore flip-flops on the red carpet last year at Cannes (Picture: Stephane Cardinale/Corbis via Getty Images)

Natalie Portman seemed happy to make a pointed reference to the dress code last year though, telling Metro.co.uk and other outlets that there was an expectation at Cannes Film Festival for women to ‘perform femininity’.

‘The different ways we, as women, are expected to behave at this festival even compared to men… How we’re supposed to look, how we’re supposed to carry ourselves,’ she observed.

‘The expectations are different on you, all the time. It affects how you behave, whether you’re buying into it or rejecting it or doing something in between. You’re defined by the social structures put on you.’

The mad Megalopolis and Demi Moore’s grotesque comeback (2024)

Brace yourself for Demi Moore in The Substance (Picture: Christine Tamalet)

Although everyone has seemed to behave pretty well (or blandly, depending on your perspective) this year, the movies on screen have still raised a lot of eyebrows.

In tribute to 2024’s whole host of often challenging and divisive films, we remember Coppola’s $120,000,000 baffling comeback movie Megalopolis including everything from a ‘boner’ for Jon Voight to a live performance. It was also the sole title this year to see loud booing mixed in with its applause from critics and audience members.

There have also been not one, but two, cinematic gang bangs thanks to Kinds of Kindness and The Apprentice, and three movies keen to include amputated fingers (Kinds of Kindness, The Shrouds and Emilia Pérez).

And Demi Moore’s horrifyingly grotesque transformation in The Substance is something that has to be seen to be believed, as well as the amount of blood and internal organs director Coralie Fargeat’s movie is splattering around.  

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