A wave of a thousand victims puts a face to French Me Too in the short film by actress Judith Godrèche | Culture

When the Me Too movement broke out in 2017 following complaints against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, there was one country that did not hide its misgivings: France. In a public letter, more than a hundred women from the world of culture, some as well-known as the actress Catherine Deneuve, expressed their reservations about the collateral effects of the complaints coming from the United States. That complex debate ended up being simplistic, turning American women into puritans compared to the more determined European women, a false dichotomy that seven years later has been definitively settled. Me Too has arrived late in France but with amplified force at the start of the 77th edition of the Cannes festival, which has tried in vain in recent years to remain outside of a historic movement that should not be limited to the world of cinema.

Moi Aussi (Me Too) is a 17-minute short film directed by actress Judith Godrèche whose relevance is more social than cinematic. It was shown as a prologue to the inaugural film—the Icelandic Ljósbrot, by Rúnar Rúnarsson—from the section A certain look and responds, according to Godrèche, to the promise she made to the five thousand victims who contacted her between February 7 of this year, when the actress reported that she was raped and attacked as a teenager by the directors Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon, who deny the facts, and on March 23, the date on which she summoned all the people who connected with her through the email that she enabled shortly after making her name public. sexual assault. Of the five thousand, about a thousand attended the meeting, most of them women, of all ages and conditions.

The short film begins with a shot of some eyes, those of Tess Barthélémy, the director’s daughter, who dressed in white walks among the people who wrote to Godrèche sharing their terrible testimonies. Barthélémy performs a somewhat simple choreography that plays with the eyes that do not see and the mouth that remains silent while he hugs or shakes hands with the victims and a polyphony of voices is heard that recount their sexual abuse, many of them within the scope family, when they were minors, and others, as adults, in the workplace. “My uncle”, “A friend of my father”, “My brother”, “My boss”, “A famous actor”, “A stranger”… “at six years old”, “at eight”, “ at 13″, “at 15…” Some of the women filmed hide their faces with the hood of their coats, or with sunglasses, others, the older ones, turn their backs to the camera, but the majority look head on.

Godrèche’s idea is saved when the music, words and dance are turned off and the thousand people silently walk down the avenue of Paris in a sequence shot in which they parade in front of the lens. That long moment starring a crowd with its heads held high is resounding and exciting. Godrèche has become the main promoter of a movement that started in France when the actress Adèle Haenel left the 2020 César Awards as a sign of protest for the applause for the filmmaker Roman Polanski, who was then awarded for The officer and the spyhis film about the famous I accuse by Émile Zola and the Dreyfus case.

A few days ago, Godrèche was asked about some somewhat clumsy statements by actor Vincent Lindon, who asked for “a roadmap” to better understand women victims of sexual assault. The actress responded with a laugh that Lindon’s phrase reveals the depths of so many men, his inability to put himself in their shoes.

Something that, curiously, the American actress Meryl Streep repeated yesterday in a meeting with the public in which she reviewed some moments of her career: “No man who sees The hunter (Michael Cimino’s 1978 film) identifies with me, with the girl. On the other hand, women do identify with the characters of (Robert) De Niro or John Savage. That’s what’s difficult, for a man to look at a woman and finally find out something.”

The showing of Godrèche’s short film was repeated two hours later on the beach, in the particular sand and sun lounger stalls in the Cinéma de La Plage programme, Gregorio Belinchón reports. The actress did go on stage that time with part of the team. She was accompanied in the session, in the first rows of lounge chairs, by fifty participants in Moi Aussi, who repeatedly covered their mouths in a gesture that replicated the images in the short, and which Godrèche praised, in a voice broken by emotion, “the bravery” of those victims. At the end of the session, the director spoke again with a nervous laugh: “It’s good to also dedicate the beach to this cinema.” And calmer, she finished: “Thank you to everyone who trusted me. “This is for them.”

Meanwhile, the snowball of French Me Too has not stopped growing. In October, one of its sacred cows, the actor Gérard Depardieu, will sit on the bench, while the producer Alain Sarde, 72, one of the most powerful in the French industry (he is behind films by Godard, Claude Sautet, Polanski, André Téchiné or Bertrand Tavernier) was accused two days ago by nine women who accused him of attacks that occurred between 1985 and 2003, which he denies.

Furthermore, the newspaper Le Monde At the start of the festival, it also published a forum signed by one hundred women, most of them well-known actresses, from Juliette Binoche to Isabelle Adjani, who demand a comprehensive law against sexual and gender violence that protects women, men and children equally. “a law that clarifies, among other things, the definition of rape and consent (…) We are not pursuing a utopia, there are so many of us that our voices can no longer stop counting.”

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