The Cannes Film Festival’s, shall we say, discomfort with the #MeToo movement has been long documented. Lest we forget, the showcase kicked off its 2023 edition—which was advertised with a poster of vocal #MeToo opponent Catherine Deneuve—with the Johnny Depp-led Jeanne du Barry, and this time around, the likes of Shia LaBeouf and Jon Voight walked the red carpet for the splashy premiere of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.
Just days earlier, The Guardian had published a story about the blockbuster’s reportedly chaotic shoot, which alleged that the director “pulled women to sit on his lap” on set and “tried to kiss some of the topless and scantily clad female extras” in a nightclub scene. (Executive co-producer Darren Demetre responded: “There were two days when we shot a celebratory Studio 54-esque club scene where Francis walked around the set to establish the spirit of the scene by giving kind hugs and kisses on the cheek to the cast and background players. It was his way to help inspire and establish the club atmosphere, which was so important to the film. I was never aware of any complaints of harassment or ill behavior during the course of the project.”) In the end, it didn’t matter: when Megalopolis premiered, it received a 10-minute standing ovation.
In the run-up to the 2024 showcase, there had been murmurings of a long-overdue reckoning, with rumors that a bombshell exposé was about to be published detailing new accusations of abuse against a number of prominent industry figures who would be in attendance. In the end, though, no such report came. At the pre-festival press conference, Cannes’s artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, was asked about the rumors and if, as was being reported, a crisis management team had been hired to battle the incoming storm. He said he couldn’t comment and reiterated that he was there to talk about the films. “It’s about the movies and whether they deserve or not, in aesthetic or artistic terms, to be there—there is no ideology guiding the selection committee,” he added of the line-up. “We are trying to have a festival without these polemics. In Cannes, the politics should be on the screen.”
The festival’s president, Iris Knobloch, had a more nuanced approach, praising the impact #MeToo has had on French society. “It’s clear that we’re living through a great moment of transformation,” she told Variety. “While I think it’s a fairly complicated time for everyone, I really believe we have to go through this.” She too, however, insisted that “the festival itself must focus on what it’s about, which is cinema”.
The topic then came up again in a string of press conferences, with jury president Greta Gerwig and Léa Seydoux, the star of the festival’s opening film, The Second Act, among those asked to weigh in. “I think people in the community of movies telling us stories and trying to change things for the better is only good,” Gerwig said on the subject. “I have seen substantive change in the American film community, and I think it’s important that we continue to expand that conversation. So I think it’s only moving everything in the correct direction to keep those lines of communication open.” (Her fellow juror Society of the Snow director J. A. Bayona had a different perspective, however, saying: “I feel this issue does not affect cinema in particular. It’s much more widespread, and we’re here to focus on the films.”) Seydoux, meanwhile, echoed Gerwig, saying: “#MeToo is very important. It’s a wonderful thing that women are now speaking out. Things are clearly changing and it was high time it did.”
But then, as it became clear that no more major scandals were about to break, the festival appeared to move on, with the focus shifting back to the general glitz and glamour. Thankfully, though, it was a different story onscreen. First came Judith Godrèche’s Moi Aussi, a powerful short inspired by the more than 6,000 stories of abuse the French actor, director, and activist received after speaking publicly about her own alleged experiences of being groomed by significantly older filmmakers Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon when she was a minor. (The pair deny accusations of sexual assault.) She’s been at the forefront of France’s #MeToo movement in recent months, with her testimony against the industry stalwarts prompting the French parliament to approve the creation of a commission to investigate abuse and sexual violence within the nation’s film, TV, performing arts, advertising, and fashion industries.
Elsewhere, there were also more indirect explorations of the topic. Rungano Nyoni’s blistering black comedy On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, for instance, opens rather ambiguously, with our impassive heroine Shula (a magnetic Susan Chardy) discovering the dead body of her uncle on the side of a road in Zambia. While all the older women in her family grieve his loss hysterically, Shula doesn’t shed a tear. We discover later that her uncle groomed a number of young girls in their family including her and her two cousins (Elizabeth Chisela and Esther Singini). Each woman’s story is distinct, but the patterns of his abuse are eerily familiar—and we can see how each of the survivors, in their own way, bears the emotional scars of what happened to them.
Two days later came the premiere of another female-centric #MeToo story from a woman director: Noémie Merlant’s raucous The Balconettes. A very different kind of comedy—broad and sometimes slapstick, while Guinea Fowl is deliciously dark—it follows three young women, Ruby (Souheila Yacoub), Nicole (Sanda Codreanu), and Élise (Merlant herself), as they lust after a hot neighbor (Lucas Bravo) from the balcony of their Marseille apartment. When he invites them over, though, things take a dark turn—and Ruby returns home late at night covered in his blood.
His assault of her and the impact it has runs parallel with another storyline: that of Élise’s relationship with her overbearing husband who, in one excruciating scene, attempts to coerce her and then rapes her. Merlant’s handling of the sequence is in stark contrast to how the most-talked-about marital rape scene at the festival played out: that in Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice. While that film swiftly moves on from the assault depicted, in The Balconettes, we see every beat of Élise’s anguish, shame, and anger. There’s an element of wish fulfillment in how both of these plot lines are resolved, but I didn’t mind that in the slightest—there just aren’t enough #MeToo movies with triumphant endings.
The opposite occurs in Sandhya Suri’s north India-set Santosh, the gut-wrenching drama that debuted at the festival another two days later. It centers on the titular widow (Shahana Goswami), who, through a government scheme, inherits her police officer husband’s place on the force following his tragic death. Brought on to investigate the rape and murder of a low-caste young girl, she’s shocked by the apathy of her male colleagues—and forced to confront the larger structures of power which continue to protect influential men and discard vulnerable women. In the end, she does find the perpetrator, but, in the patriarchal world she occupies, it just isn’t possible to bring him to justice.
Doubtless there were many more #MeToo-themed films at the festival which I didn’t get the chance to see, and Cannes’s organizers certainly deserve credit for including so many fascinating, thought-provoking and galvanizing explorations of the topic from women on the line-up. It’s a great first step—but the second would be to discourage more of these controversial figures from attending the festival, and establish Cannes’s reputation as a place where abuse simply isn’t tolerated. Because, ultimately, Frémaux is right: in Cannes, the politics should be on the screen, but it also is, and should be, everywhere else, too.
