Hasta La Ideas

Now that the six month long ordeal over John Galliano‘s drunken racial slurs has ended, with a French court deciding to slap an immediately suspended sentence on the former top Dior designer and order him to pay up a relatively small fee, the government can now focus its attention on this year’s other Nazi-remarks-based controversy, this one involving director Lars von Trier. Though nowhere near the media-bombarding scandal that Galliano’s very public trial was, there was still plenty of press at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, when the director’s tongue seemed to get away from him, resulting in a train wreck of a press conference for his new film where he said things like, “[Hitler] is not what you would call a good guy, but, yeah, I understand much about him and I sympathize with him a little bit” and ended with a sort of what-have-I-done quote that’s perhaps the worst possible soundbite ever: “Ok, I am a Nazi.” The AP is reporting that von Trier himself has said that he was recently interviewed by Danish police officers concerning charges placed against him by the French, alleging that he’d broken “French law against the glorification of war crimes.” However, the AP also reports that the French police, such charges don’t exist. Apparently at this time, the authorities are still investigating to see if there’s a case, but have not yet charged the director with a thing. So simply a misunderstanding or language barrier, or just some wishful, bizarre thinking from von Trier, who seems to enjoy a good stir of controversy now and again?

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