It’s the first true Big Cannes Moment to happen since I arrived in Cannes on Friday: Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, starring Charlote Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, screened for the press last night, and immediately word started to spread that the film was intentionally unreleasable, chock full of intense violence, graphic sexuality, unforgivable misogyny … and also beauty. One man’s total debacle is another’s ecstatic vision, but thus far the Antichrist supporters seem to be outnumbered by the offended press. I haven’t seen the film yet — I waited in line for an hour last night, but didn’t get in — but I did watch the press conference. As I passed through the Palais, my attention was drawn over to a bank of monitors when I saw this quote on Matt Dentler’s Twitter stream: “I work for myself,” Von Trier said. “And I am the best film director in the world.”

From that point on, the back and forth between the director and the assembled journalists was nervously hostile, but Von Trier himself, graying and puffy behind Santa glasses, seemed strangely weary and subdued. When a female journalist pleaded with him to “say something to help up understand what you were trying to say, if you were trying to say anything,” Von Trier sighed, “I’m not trying to say anything.” When asked to back up his previous boast about being the best director in the world, Von Trier backpedaled a bit. “Okay, I am not sure I am, but I feel it. There must be other directors I haven’t met, or haven’t seen there films.”

The mood brightened a bit when Von Trier was asked to defend the film’s — SPOILER ALERT! — depiction of genital mutilation. “We could only shoot it once you know,” Von Trier wryly began. The press burst into laughter. “So Charlotte had to really prepare….for me, it would have been a lie not to show it.”

For a moment, a taste of the old Von Trier — the one who bemoans dishonesty in the cinema even as his whole persona seems to be about creating performance art out of facetiousness, whose immense egoism is matched only by his masochism. As he put it, almost brightly, when asked by a journalist how he’ll cobat the hostility of journalists, “Maybe it will be a catastrophe. I’ve been treated bad by the press before, and I like it.”