Danish director Lars von Trier sparked the event's biggest recent controversy

The 66th Cannes film festival opens on Wednesday with Gatsby as aperitif, Spielberg as jury president and many millionaires' yachts sharking in off the Med. On the face of it, all is well; the forecast is sunny. And yet there remains a puckish-shaped hole at the heart of the schedule. Cannes is missing its prodigal son.

Danish director Lars von Trier sparked the event's biggest recent controversy when he fatally misjudged the mood of a 2011 press conference – merrily joking that he was a Nazi who "sympathised with Hitler, a little bit". Spooked by the ensuing media storm, festival organisers declared him persona non grata and cast him out like Satan. He was last seen barrelling north from the Croisette inside his trusty camper van (he nurses an abiding fear of flying).

If he did not have a new film, Von Trier's absence from this year's lineup might pass unnoticed. The CV, though, tells a different story. His forthcoming work, Nymphomaniac, stars Shia LaBeouf, Jamie Bell, Stellan Skarsgard and Willem Dafoe. It casts Charlotte Gainsbourg as its central figure – a "self-diagnosed nymphomaniac" whom the film tracks from youth to middle-age. Expectations have been building for months, with Deadline.com excitedly trumpeting the film as "a four-hour sex-o-rama".

Officially, the Cannes organisers are happy to let bygones be bygones. Von Trier was expelled from the festival, not banned for life. "The day he has a film ready in time for Cannes we will talk to him again," festival director Thierry Frémaux told Screen Daily last month. Unfortunately Von Trier missed the submissions deadline; Nymphomania was simply not finished. All of which sounds entirely reasonable until one realises that the film is actually released in Denmark on 30 May, just four days after the festival wraps up. It seems unlikely that he could not have delivered at least a rough cut to the selection panel were it not for some lingering animus – either on his part or that of the festival's.

As it is (and barring some extraordinary 11th-hour reprieve), Cannes has been deprived of a major firework. Nymphomaniac might have been brilliant; it might have been dreadful. Either way, Von Trier's reputedly unsimulated "sex-o-rama" was guaranteed to have made some noise. "There's a disclaimer at the top of the script that basically says we're doing it for real," LaBeouf said recently. "Everything that is illegal, we'll shoot in blurred images. Other than that, everything is happening … Von Trier is dangerous," he added. "He scares me."

It's safe to assume he scares the Cannes bosses too. And yet past history suggests that they've often been more content to play the role of nervous, giggling sidekick than stern, disciplinarian dad. In the past three decades, Von Trier has been invited to show nine films in festival competition. He won the 2000 Palme d'Or for Dancer in the Dark, publicly tossed his 1991 jury prize for Europa into the bin, and prompted a torrent of boos and hisses with his 2009 horror film Antichrist. The Cannes film festival was his principal stage. And Cannes, for its part, appeared overjoyed to have him there. He was its mischievous bad boy in a rotating supergroup of international auteurs.

According to Thomas Vinterberg – the Danish director of Festen and The Hunt and a sometime colleague of Von Trier – the man and the festival are joined at the hip. "The thing about Lars is that he always plays this game of teasing the grownups, pushing the boundaries," Vinterberg told me late last year. "And nobody ever said no until that day [in Cannes]. He may very much disagree, but I think maybe it was good for him. He found his wall and it was right in front of him in Cannes, which I thought was beautiful. It couldn't be written better."

Von Trier's expulsion now leaves him on the sidelines, the rattling ghost at this year's event. He joins the long-forgotten Simone Sylva, a 1950s French starlet who posed topless on the beach with Robert Mitchum, much to the fury of the Cannes top brass. Following her own ejection, Sylva's career hit the buffers. She died of a stroke a few years later at just 29.

In the case of Lars Von Trier – a brilliant, maddening talent – the prognosis is altogether more rosy. He transgressed and was punished and the scars, it seems, have yet to fully heal. But Cannes and Von Trier need each other. Most observers have no doubt that he will one day return, more brilliantly maddening than ever. When he does it will be standing room only at the post-screening press conference.
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