Yesterday, the French mega-star was discovered responsible of sexual assaulting two ladies on a movie set. It is verdict which might have a huge impact on the nation’s movie trade.
It could not have been timed extra dramatically if it had been written into a movie script. The world’s most well-known movie competition, in Cannes, started on the identical day that Gérard Depardieu, one of many largest movie stars France has ever produced, was discovered responsible of sexually assaulting two ladies on the movie set of a 2021 movie, The Inexperienced Shutters, who described him groping them whereas utilizing obscene language. “The giants of cinema are not untouchable,” exclaimed one French information web site, whereas one other stated that the information had “shaken up” the beginning of the enduring competition, from the place I’m at present reporting.
Seventy-six-year-old Depardieu is the veteran of round 200 movies and TV productions. Well-known in France because the late Sixties, he had worldwide artwork home hits with movies akin to 1986’s Jean de Florette. He turned a worldwide identify because of a finest actor Oscar nomination for a lavish French-language movie manufacturing of Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), in addition to the Hollywood romcom Inexperienced Card from the identical 12 months. Yesterday, Depardieu was given an 18-month suspended jail sentence, fined €29,000 (£24,430) and added to France’s intercourse offenders register, however his lawyer stated he’ll attraction the judgement.
Round 20 ladies have made allegations about Depardieu’s improper behaviour previously, however that is the primary to come back to trial, and the importance of the decision can’t be overstated, in keeping with author Agnès C Poirier. “When a monument falls, it’s all the time highly effective and symbolic,” she tells the BBC.
She provides that his fame is “profoundly tarnished” however that “the French movie trade sentenced him a very long time in the past. He hasn’t shot a movie in three years. His profession is completed. He is nonetheless one of many best actors of the twentieth Century, although we might now really feel completely different once we watch his movies.”
The temper at Cannes
For a few years, the larger-than-life determine of Depardieu has additionally been linked to the Cannes Movie Competition. He gained one of the best actor prize right here for Cyrano de Bergerac, launching it on its Oscar journey, and in addition performed a component behind the scenes; its director, Thierry Frémaux, admitted {that a} much-derided soccer movie from 2014, United Passions, starring Depardieu, premiered at Cannes due to stress from the actor. He was most lately seen in 2015 on the competition with Isabelle Huppert for the movie Valley of Love (and was seen staging a mock kiss on the photocall, as pictured under).
Unsurprisingly, Cannes Jury President, Juliette Binoche, who has additionally starred reverse Depardieu, was requested for her ideas on the significance of his conviction at yesterday’s opening press convention.
“He’s not sacred,” she instructed journalists, a reference to the dimensions of Depardieu’s energy within the French movie trade.
Eve Jackson, the Tradition Editor at French information channel France 24, tells the BBC that Depardieu “has been revered as one of many sons of the Cannes Movie Competition. And now that legacy goes to be referred to as into query as a result of it actually was this competition that launched him into worldwide stardom 35 years in the past with Cyrano de Bergerac.”
Final 12 months’s competition, anticipating Depardieu’s forthcoming trial, was stuffed with exercise from France’s personal #MeToo motion, with French feminine film-makers utilizing worldwide cinema’s most public platform to point out movies coping with the topic of sexual abuse.
Actress Judith Godrèche, who had lately gone public with allegations of sexual assault by two film-makers, Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon, premiered a brief movie referred to as Moi Aussi, (“me too”) that includes lots of of victims of sexual abuse standing silently within the streets of Paris. Final July, each Jacquot and Doillon had been interviewed by police in reference to the accusations, which they’ve denied.
This 12 months, seven movies in the principle competitors are by feminine administrators. One in all them, The Sound of Falling by German writer-director Mascha Schilinski, which premieres right now, explores generational abuse of women instructed by means of the story of 1 household. Nevertheless it stays to be seen what number of extra movies will deal with the subject of abuse throughout this competition.
Past the movies, Jackson says the environment feels completely different on the 2025 competition, on account of some high-profile circumstances which have despatched shockwaves throughout France. Chief amongst them, in December, Dominique Pelicot and 50 different males had been convicted of the rape, tried rape and sexual assault of of Pelicot’s 72-year-old spouse Gisèle Pelicot. In February, director Christophe Ruggia was convicted of sexually assaulting Portrait of a Woman on Hearth actor Adèle Haenel when she was a toddler; Haenel publicly give up the movie trade in 2023, accusing it of “normal complacency” in the direction of sexual predators. Benoît Jacquot has been charged with raping two actors, which he denies.
A wider shift in attitudes
“There is a large change that is happening inside the French movie trade and you may really feel it right here at Cannes,” Jackson says. “And I believe the autumn of Depardieu actually does signify this seismic change in France, that is maybe come later than in Hollywood and the remainder of the world, however it’s right here now. Younger actors are calling out wrongdoing on set increasingly, and somebody like Ruggia obtained a four-year jail sentence (two years of which had been suspended) for what he did to Adèle Haenel. They is probably not worldwide names in the best way Depardieu is, however they’re very important to France. This concept of energy play on movie units from actors and administrators is not acceptable.”
There’s some technique to go, nonetheless; final month a French Parliamentary report, led by French MP Sandrine Rousseau, discovered that abuse was “endemic” throughout the complete French leisure trade, and that attitudes had been “barely evolving” regardless of the #MeToo motion. The detailed report had 86 suggestions for change, together with larger protections for youngster actors and using intimacy co-ordinators as commonplace for intercourse scenes in cinema, and theatre (as of December 2023, solely 4 of them had been reported as working throughout the entire of France, in contrast with 100 within the US leisure trade).
Depardieu additionally had some high-profile defenders; President Macron stated in 2024 that the actor “made France proud”. Seventy-six-year-old actor Fanny Ardant is one in every of his most steadfast supporters – Depardieu was absent from the decision making a movie together with her within the Azores yesterday – and she or he got here to courtroom to assist him, alongside his Cyrano de Bergerac co-star Vincent Perez. Brigitte Bardot, a French movie star of the Nineteen Fifties and 60s, additionally publicly defended him.
However Jackson factors to a response to an occasion through the Depardieu trial, which she says is important of a societal shift. She says there was condemnation when Depardieu’s lawyer Jérémie Assous accused the actor’s two feminine victims within the courtroom case, a 54-year-old set dresser and a 34-year-old assistant director, of “hysteria”, being “liars” and dealing for the reason for “rabid feminism”.
“I believe Depardieu is more and more seen as from a special period and so are his attorneys,” she says. “They had been referred to as sexist in the best way they spoke to the plaintiffs, calling them feminists as if it was a nasty factor. And it added to his troubles, as a result of the decide referred to as it out and imposed an additional nice [of €2,000] due to it. It highlights the generational shift that is occurring in France. His supporters are actors from the older technology akin to Ardant and Bardot.”
A couple of days earlier than Depardieu’s conviction, the 90-year-old Bardot publicly referred to as the actor a “genius” on French TV, and deplored that “gifted individuals who contact the underside of a lady are consigned to the deepest dungeon”. However this type of perspective is seen by the younger as archaic, says Jackson, and they’re much less conscious of his fame as a terrific actor.
“For folks over the age of maybe 50 and 60, Depardieu evokes recollections of being a terrific actor of a sure period, however I do not know what number of youthful persons are involved in that story anymore,” she says.