There’s bound to be a critically reviled premiere at every film festival. But no debut in recent years has been more horrific than the premiere of Sean Penn’s “The Last Face” at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival (our F-grade review here). Penn’s passion project, starring Javier Bardem as a relief doctor in Africa who falls in love with Charlize Theron’s international aid worker, was torn to shreds by the Cannes audience. It was a total evisceration and an example of how vicious critics at Cannes can be.
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Six years after that ravaging, though, Bardem embraces the hate for the film. During a 75th anniversary celebration of the festival, Deadline reports that the Academy Award winner was candid about how he felt about how badly “The Last Face” bombed. “It was a disaster!” he told the audience after a question about the film with a smile on his face, “But, let me tell you, it was a great disaster. It’s good to come to a festival like Cannes and be booed and be reminded that what we do can be horrific because otherwise, we think of ourselves too highly. I have my own idea about what that movie was.”
After its disastrous premiere, DirectTV gave “The Last Face” a minimal release in 2017, followed by a day-and-date on demand and limited theatrical release from Saban Films. Its final box office numbers? $1.2 million: not just a flop, but a loud, resounding bellyflop that drops right to the bottom of the pool.
Bardem appears to have made amends with the critically reviled project, though. At the festival, he continued, “We worked hard on making that movie — I haven’t done any movie where people didn’t work hard. But it was a missed [opportunity]. I mean, it was a [misfire] of a movie, in my opinion. People saw that, people shared that, and the whole rules of the festival changed after that. Right? Now [critics] cannot post reviews on the same day of the opening, because the opening of that movie that day was like a funeral.” So, “The Last Face” was so bad it changed Cannes’ rules of same-day reviews; ouch.
Bardem has a good perspective on the whole debacle, though. “But I was laughing. I was like, ‘Yes — this is what it is to make movies.’ Sometimes you do ‘No Country for Old Men,’ sometimes you do [a film like] this one, and it is not important whether it’s great or bad. You keep on doing what you need to do. I mean, it’s like life.”
Thankfully for Penn, his latest film “Flag Day” had a better, albeit still mixed, reception at last year’s Cannes. It still did poorly at the box office, though, as UnitedArtists and MGM gave it another limited theatrical release. The film made only $424,667 at the box office.