Just hours before the curtain went up on the 78th Cannes Film Festival, a tremor shook the cinema world, completing the fall from grace of a titan of French film long regarded as untouchable.
On Tuesday morning, as stars gathered on the French Riviera for the start of cinema’s glitziest shindig, a court in Paris found Gérard Depardieu guilty of sexually assaulting two women on a movie set – in a case widely seen as a test of France’s troubled #MeToo reckoning.
The 76-year-old actor, who has been accused of rape or sexual assault by more than a dozen women, was convicted of having groped a 54-year-old set dresser and a 34-year-old assistant during the filming of “Les Volets Verts” (The Green Shutters) in 2021. He was given an 18-month suspended prison sentence and the court requested that he be registered in the national sex offender database.
Depardieu, who is appealing the verdict, was ordered to pay a further €1,000 each to the plaintiffs over the “excessive harshness” displayed in court by his lawyer, who sparked outrage by branding the women “hysterical” and “liars” working for the cause of “rabid feminism”.
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Carine Durrieu Diebolt, a lawyer for one of the plaintiffs, described the ruling as “the victory of two women” and “of all women beyond this trial”.
“Today we hope to see the end of impunity for an artist in the world of cinema,” she added. “And today, as the Cannes Film Festival opens, I’d like the film world to spare a thought for Gérard Depardieu’s victims.”
‘Endemic’ abuse
The Depardieu verdict marks an important step in France’s fraught reckoning with widespread abuse and impunity in the film industry, said film expert Geneviève Sellier, a professor emeritus at Bordeaux-Montaigne University who runs a blog on “Cinema and Gender”.
“Over many decades, Depardieu benefited from the silence of the film world,” she said. “But we’re witnessing a societal shift on such issues, spurred by the courageous testimonies of dozens and dozens of victims of abuse.”
The build-up to the 78th Cannes Film Festival has been overshadowed by a damning French parliamentary inquiry into the entertainment industry published in early April, which concluded that “moral, sexist, and sexual violence in the cultural sector is systemic, endemic, and persistent”.
The six-month inquiry heard testimony from around 350 people in the film, TV, theatre and performing arts industries, including some of the biggest names in French cinema. Its final report made nearly 90 recommendations including better safeguarding for children and women during castings and on set, noting that the entertainment industry was often a “talent shredder” while casting calls were “a place of highest danger”.
The key challenge now is for lawmakers and the industry to translate the report’s findings into concrete action, said Sellier, noting that the “defensive posture” adopted by many industry workers during parliamentary auditions “begs the question of whether they have really grasped the scale of the problem”.
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Green lawmaker Sandrine Rousseau, who chaired the cross-party investigation, has warned that, “the professional entertainment world needs to listen, read and take on board what is in the report".
An outspoken feminist, she called on Cannes to set an example in stamping out sexual abuse, as well as physical and psychological violence.
“The Cannes Film Festival must be the place where this shift in mindset happens,” she told reporters. “The place where we say loud and clear (...) amid the glitter and the red carpets (...) that finally, we all want things to change: every one of us, at every level of the industry.”
Cult of the auteur
The parliamentary inquiry owes much to the strenuous campaigning of French actor and director Judith Godrèche, whose accounts of the grooming she says she endured as a teenage actor triggered a belated #MeToo reckoning in France.
Read more‘Wind of revolt’ sweeps French cinema in belated #MeToo reckoning
Last year, Cannes screened a short film by Godrèche titled “Moi Aussi” (Me Too, in French), a choral piece uniting victims of all ages, some of them male, who find strength and solace in speaking out about their personal trauma. The screening marked one of the highlights of a festival that has long been accused of doing too little to foster gender parity in film and where the disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein once held court.
In 2017, at the dawn of the #MeToo era, Godrèche was among the first to speak out against Weinstein, telling the New York Times that the film producer assaulted her in a hotel during the Cannes Film Festival two decades earlier, when she was 24. Since then, the press has been awash with reports of industry insiders, Cannes chauffeurs and hotel staff confirming Weinstein’s predatory behaviour.
For years, however, France’s own Weinsteins evaded scrutiny, shielded by ingrained suspicion of the #MeToo movement as a puritanical witch-hunt imported from America – and by what Sellier describes as a “cult of the auteur” that has long been used to excuse or cover up reprehensible behaviour.
“The cult of the auteur places artistic genius – regarded as necessarily male – above the law,” said the academic, who has written a book titled “Le culte de l’auteur”. She added: “This French tradition explains in part why the country remains largely blind to the realities of male domination and abuse.”
Talk of powerful men turning a blind eye to allegations of abuse, or even siding with purported aggressors, became the subject of a nationwide controversy in late 2023 when French President Emmanuel Macron condemned a “manhunt” targeting Depardieu, whom he described as a “genius of his art” who “makes France proud”.
“Powerful men still hold sway in the industry,” said Sellier, noting that it took a jail sentence for sexual assault for Dominique Boutonnat, the embattled head of France’s powerful National Centre for Cinema (CND), to finally resign last year.
The end of the monstre sacré
The dearth of women holding senior positions in the industry, and of female filmmakers in particular, has been a recurrent subject in Cannes – one festival director Thierry Frémaux is generally loath to address.
The man in charge of Cannes’ official line-up has repeatedly stressed that he chooses films based on merit and not on gender. He has steadfastly refused to push female directors in the festival’s Official Selection through affirmative action – which in France translates as “positive discrimination” but is often viewed negatively.
This year, however, Frémaux opened his presentation by touting the record number of women in the Palme d’Or race – seven out of a total of 22. He added that female directors accounted for 38% of the roughly 3,000 films submitted to the festival, seemingly undercutting his past argument that the small number of women selected in previous editions reflected a lack of submissions.
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“Cannes never used to provide such figures, but now they’re keen to show they’re on the right side of the #MeToo debate,” said Sellier. “Yes, there are more women filmmakers than in the past. But what’s really changing is that they're finally enjoying some of the visibility afforded by platforms like Cannes.”
A changing of the guard is perhaps most notable this year in the juries for the festival’s various categories, all of which are presided over by women – with France’s Juliette Binoche heading the Palme d’Or jury.
Binoche was naturally quizzed about Depardieu at Cannes’ traditional opening press conference on Tuesday. Asked whether such a verdict would have been possible without the #MeToo movement, she answered, “Of course not”. When one reporter described Depardieu as a monstre sacré, a phrase commonly used to refer to iconic, untouchable artists, Binoche retorted, “He’s not a sacred monster, he’s a man who lost his aura owing to the facts established in court.”
Reflecting on the role of Cannes, the jury president said the festival was “in step” with the changing times.
“Sometimes (Cannes) follows the trend, sometimes it spearheads it,” she added. “#MeToo took some time to gain strength. But we reacted strongly.”
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