Sean Penn’s new film draws unintended laughs, boos at Cannes

SEAN Penn’s latest directorial effort has been branded “pompous”, “numbingly empty” and “insulting refugee porn”.

Sean Penn leaves the Festival Palace on Friday after the screening of the film The Last Face at the 69th Cannes Film Festival in France. Picture: AFP PHOTO / Alberto Pizzoli

ACTOR and director Sean Penn was left red-faced when his new film, The Last Face, was booed by audiences at the Cannes Film Festival.

But Penn has hit back at the howling critics, saying the film about aid workers in Africa was a rare example of entertainment that tackled big issues.

The romance drama, Penn’s fifth directorial effort, stars his former partner Charlize Theron as an aid worker and Javier Bardem as a doctor who struggle to maintain their love affair while completing humanitarian work in a brutal war zone.

Some audience members burst into laughter at various cringeworthy lines of dialogue and responded with boos when the credits began to roll.

Oscar-winning actors Javier Bardem and Charlize Theron in Sean Penn’s The Last Face.

Critics have especially taken aim at the film’s disproportionate focus on Theron and Bardem against the backdrop of suffering in Sierra Leone, Liberia and South Sudan.

The Hollywood Reporter called The Last Face a “stunningly self-important but numbingly empty cocktail of romance and insulting refugee porn”.

Reviewer Dave Calhoun branded the film “awful” and “pompous”.

“Pompous romance with human suffering as wallpaper,” he tweeted.

“Pleads empathy with Africa. Zero real black characters.”

Melissa Silverstein, a campaigner for gender equality in Hollywood, said she joined in with the booing “for my first time” when the film premiered on Friday.

Penn and Theron keep their distance at a screening of The Last Face at the Cannes Film Festival. Picture: AFP / Alberto Pizzoli

“I was so bad that I laughed at [sic] loud at times,” she tweeted.

Charles Bramesco of Rolling Stone tweeted: “The Last Face: Liberian warlords are a slightly greater menace than Sean Penn, but it’s close.

“Either way, this is a crime against humanity.”

Other commentators speculated the film was probably the reason Theron and Penn broke up.

“Is it possible Charlize Theron saw a rough cut of The Last Face and *then* ended things with Sean Penn? I would,” Variety’s chief critic Guy Lodge tweeted.

Theron and Penn ended their engagement in June last year after 18 months together.

The pair were careful to ensure other cast members provided a buffer between them as they awkwardly posed for photographers at the film’s premiere.

Penn poses with actors Adele Exarchopoulos and Zubin Cooper at The Last Face premiere at Cannes on Friday. Picture: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

The director and leading lady also avoided sitting next to each other during a press conference, in which Penn brushed aside bad reviews.

“I stand behind the film as it is, and certainly everyone is entitled to their response,” Penn said.

Penn said “too much of film today” was empty entertainment that was “pulling us away from our humanity”.

“I think it’s important to entertain if entertainment is not synonymous with Donald Trump’s behaviour,” he said.

“To find beauty in things is the way to fix things. I just think that what we’re calling beauty today is largely a perversion of it. That is lamentable.”

The Last Face, which was funded partly by Penn, has been entered into the festival’s biggest award, the Palme d’Or, which will be awarded on Sunday.