David Lynch Cries During ‘Twin Peaks’ Standing Ovation at Cannes (Video)
Director David Lynch received the coveted standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday after a screening of the first two episodes of the “Twin Peaks’ revival.
A video of the ovation — released by Cinéma Canal — shows Lynch getting teary as he thanks everybody in the audience. At one point he clutches his chest and at another, he blows kisses to the people around him.
The video above is short, but according to reports, the ovation lasted around five minutes — one of the longer ones at this year’s festival.
But the beauty of the video is not in a large crowd of people admiring a veteran director’s work, but in how it compares to a previous reaction Lynch received 25 years ago.
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Lynch has received some mixed reactions at Cannes over the years. The “Twin Peaks” prequel film, “Fire Walk With Me,” was famously booed at the festival in 1992 while “Wild at Heart” was both booed and awarded the Palme d’Or.
However, the festival’s rejection of “Fire Walk With Me” is representative of how people viewed the film when it was first released. Reviews were not only mostly negative, but scathing.
“Everything about David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’ is a deception. It’s not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be,” wrote New York Times critic Vincent Canby at the time.
Even after the screening, Lynch continued to receive boos from the Cannes attendees.
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“It was like I was made of broken glass, you know, when I went in there,” he told Chris Rodley years later, in an interview, as quoted in a Telegraph article. “And it really was not fun.”
Lynch has made appearances at the festival since then — “Mulholland Drive” earned him a Best Director award at Cannes — but the famous booing has always haunted “Twin Peaks.” Nowadays, you can find many critics who revere “Fire Walk With Me” as a masterpiece, but at the time, it was seen as a failure.
Only the director himself can say whether or not the standing ovation was vindication for that festival 25 years ago, but for a fan, it sure feels like it.
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Our Dream Expert Has Made Sense of 'Twin Peaks,' and It's Very Sad
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