In 1977, the director Roman Polanski was indicted on six criminal charges related to drugging and raping a 13-year-old. He pleaded guilty to unlawful intercourse with a minor and fled the US in 1978 before he could be sentenced. He has been making films in Europe ever since. The essential facts of this case are not disputed.

In 1992, the director Woody Allen was accused of molesting his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, then seven years old. Two investigations concluded that there was no merit to the allegations and authorities declined to press charges. A bitterly difficult and complicated war of words has been waged ever since, by multiple people connected and unconnected with the case. Allen has long denied wrongdoing, and as far as the law is concerned, he is innocent. From the perspective of Farrow’s supporters, it’s a disgrace that he’s still thriving.

Both directors have just premiered films at the 80th Venice Film Festival, and the inclusion of both Polanski’s The Palace and Allen’s Coup de Chance has been protested in Venice, with signs glued to the Lido reading, “Island of Rapists,” “Polanski Wanted,” and “Coupe de Chance: La justice ne fait pas son travail [Coup de Chance: Justice does not do its job].” One banner asked, “Will the Golden Lion go to a rapist?”

The answer to this last question, at least, is a resounding no. Polanski’s The Palace was so disastrous that it would appear to rule out any possibility of honors, and regardless, both Polanski’s and Allen’s films were shown out of competition. Notionally a comedy, The Palace is set in a luxury hotel on the eve of the new millennium, and plays as if someone had unearthed a dreadful script written around the same time. They don’t make ’em like this anymore, and thank goodness.

The Palace is the kind of film in which a dog voiding its bowels after being fed caviar is supposed to be richly comic. At one point, the same pampered pooch finds a vibrator in Fanny Ardant’s character’s luggage and drops it on her bed in front of a sexy plumber—again, this is meant to play as the height of hilarity. Mickey Rourke shows up as a Donald Trump–meets–Hulk Hogan asshole called Mr. Crush, whose wig flies off when he opens some Champagne. John Cleese appears as a Texas billionaire with a much younger wife, leading to further would-be LOLs when she is unable to decouple from him after sex. There are various Russian models, Russian gangsters, and older women with highly visible cosmetic surgery along for the ride too. A penguin wanders about aimlessly. This probably all makes it sound more interesting than it is.

The reviews have been uncompromising. The Times declared it “an eye-scorching atrocity.” Variety despaired, “Nothing in the movie is funny,” while The Telegraph noted that “the humour certainly feels at least 23 years past its sell-by date, though less in the sense of ‘you can’t tell these jokes anymore’ than ‘why would you want to?’”

The Palace feels like someone saw The White Lotus and decided to remake it in the vein of a dated sex comedy. The old chestnut about whether it is possible to separate the art from the artist doesn’t apply here, because, well…what art? Where? Before the film was actually unveiled, critics fretted that if Polanski had made a masterpiece, they would be faced with a moral dilemma: whether, or how, to write about the work of a child rapist, without becoming part of an insidious and tacit laundering of the man’s reputation.

As it turns out, by programming Polanski’s utterly unwatchable attempt at comedy, the Venice Film Festival has been instrumental in allowing Polanski to thoroughly cancel himself on artistic as well as moral grounds.

Could this have been the Biennale bosses’ game plan all along? Having seen the film, you’re left clutching these kinds of straws when seeking a rationale for the decision to program it. It all feels like a joke, and a much better joke than anything in The Palace.

Meanwhile, Allen’s film Coup de Chance premiered out of competition Monday night. Ironically, it is a much better film than The Palace (though as has hopefully been made clear above, most films are better than The Palace, including Xanadu and Howard the Duck). The debate around Allen’s appearance at Venice is much more complex than it is around Polanski’s. Allen has never been charged with a crime, and though cultural attitudes toward him have shifted significantly in recent years, he remains innocent in the eyes of the law.

Different film critics have responded in different ways to the conundrum this creates. Some believe Farrow and have therefore refused to cover Allen’s films. Some believe Allen and review his work accordingly. Others believe Farrow, but cover Allen’s work with this in mind. And there are many critics who argue that the allegations are immaterial to their coverage: They are reporting on the work, not on Allen himself. Beyond the press corps, audiences and protestors have made their strength of feeling plain: There were cheers for Woody Allen’s name when it appeared onscreen inside the cinema, and a standing ovation when the film finished—while outside, protestors scuffled with security next to the red carpet.

As with Polanski, there’s a contrast between the seriousness of the conversation around these issues and the film in question. Coup de Chance is a brisk and frothy black comedy, Allen’s best in years (though again we need to qualify this by pointing out that Allen has been making mostly terrible films for decades now). Coup de Chance plays like a Patricia Highsmith story shot by Nancy Meyers, as a woman (‎Lou de Laâge) who may or may not be married to a rather stylish murderer (Melvil Poupaud) flits around a variety of scenic Paris locations and apartments to die for.

The film is for the most part a diverting enough entertainment, though one aspect of it may bring pause to anyone who has followed the Farrow allegations closely. Dylan Farrow says that when her abuse took place in the attic of her mother’s country house in Connecticut, she focused visually on a toy train track set up in the same room, and subsequently found it very difficult to look at toy trains. This detail has been employed in different ways by defenders and accusers as strong evidence both for and against the truthfulness of the allegation. In Coup de Chance, the is-he-or-isn’t-he murderer repeatedly plays with a toy train set. Innocuous detail, pure coincidence, or deliberate reference? And if it is a deliberate reference, what does Allen mean by it? As with so much in this case, it’s difficult to definitively prove either way—and therein lies the problem.

While Coup de Chance is unlikely to feature strongly in awards season, and may struggle to secure distribution in the US more than an equivalent film made by a director whose name is less mired in controversy, there’s a sense of disconnect between the seriousness of the surrounding discourse and the lightness of the film. Anyone unlucky enough to have watched what will surely be one of the few public screenings of Polanski’s The Palace will have likely sensed the same thing—a gulf between a film trying to prompt laughter and the anger on the faces of the protestors outside.