Four years after the first wave of Me Too in French cinema – driven by actress Adèle Haenel by leaving the 2020 César Awards in protest against the awards to Roman Polanski – the Cannes festival, which opened yesterday, has become the stage chosen by French feminism to give visibility to the second wave of the movement in this country.
On the eve of the opening of the 77th edition of the most important film competition in the world, the influential producer Alain Sarde was accused by nine women, most of them protected by anonymity, of rape and sexual assault in the 80s and 90s. His accusations, that have not yet taken the form of a complaint in court, join an already long list of cases that includes the trial in June of Dominique Boutonnat, director of the CNC—the equivalent of the Spanish Film Institute—for alleged sexual abuse of his godson; the indictment of Gérard Depardieu; the complaints filed by the actress Judith Godrèche against the directors Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon for having raped her when she was a minor or the revelations of another actress, Juliette Binoche, who in April claimed to have suffered years of abuse on filming.
Sexual violence also occupied the front page of the newspaper Le Monde this Tuesday with a column signed by a hundred personalities calling for a comprehensive law to combat it in a country in which 94% of rape complaints end up being dismissed.
The general delegate of the festival, Thierry Frémaux, has insisted that these complaints cannot “ruin” the essence of the contest – talking about the films – but the number of cases that have come to light in recent years makes it impossible for the French cinema keeps looking the other way. The appointment in 2022 of a woman, Iris Knobloch, as president of the pageant was considered a turning point, but seven years after the fall of the American producer Harvey Weinstein and the outbreak of Me Too globally, the French industry has not experienced the shock that could be expected. Macron’s Government, whose passivity in the fight against gender violence is striking, has not been up to par either, as denounced by a sector of feminism that demands the enshrinement of the notion of consent in the laws.
If it were not for the courage of Godrèche, who will present a short film in Cannes with the testimonies of dozens of victims and who managed to get the National Assembly to create a commission of inquiry into sexual abuse in the audiovisual sector, the Me Too movement would still have no even a hint of an institutional response in France. A problem of this magnitude cannot be fixed without raising awareness among the entire sector or without a forceful response from the legislative branch.
