She is perhaps the greatest French actress of her generation. But Adèle Haenel has had enough. The 34-year-old actress had already turned her back on cinema. Now she slams the door in his face.
Posted at 12:48 am. Updated at 06:00.
On Tuesday, the artist and feminist activist responded to an interview request from Télérama magazine with a bold letter denouncing the hypocrisy of the cinema world. “I have decided to politicize my cinema closure to denounce the profession’s general complacency towards sexual aggressors and, more generally, the way this medium is colluding with the deadly racist ecocide world order as it stands. is,” she wrote.
That stunning tone isn’t unusual for the 120 Beats Per Minute and Portrait of the Girl on Fire actress. Three years ago, Adèle Haenel made a remarkable exit in the middle of the Césars Gala, while Roman Polanski received the Best Director award for “I Accuse”. ” Shame ! “, she had begun when she suddenly left the Salle Pleyel, accompanied by her ex-partner, the director Céline Sciamma. “Well done, pedophilia!” she added from behind the scenes.
When Polanski’s latest film hit theaters, a fifth woman, photographer Valentine Monnier, accused the filmmaker of raping her when she was 18. The filmmaker’s four other accusers were minors at the time of the crime. In 1977, Roman Polanski was convicted of having had illicit sex with a minor (Samantha Geimer, who was 13). After serving a 42-day sentence, he fled the United States for France.
The impunity surrounding Polanski in France inspired Adèle Haenel in particular to make a poignant video statement on the news site Mediapart in November 2019. Moved and determined, she accused director Christophe Ruggia of touching and sexual harassment during the filming of the film The Devils, which revealed her in the early 2000s when she was barely 12 years old.
Today, Adèle Haenel accuses the entire film industry of being an accomplice to sex offenders.
During this time, they all join forces to save face for the Depardieus, the Polanskis, and the Boutonnats. It bothers them, it bothers them that the victims are making too much noise, they prefer that we continue to disappear and die in silence.
Adèle Haenel, in her letter
Thirteen women accused Gérard Depardieu of sexual violence, particularly on film sets, in another Mediapart investigation last month. Dominique Boutonnat, a donor to Emmanuel Macron’s presidential campaign, was reappointed as head of France’s National Cinema Center by the Council of Ministers last July, despite an imminent trial for sexually assaulting his godson.
PHOTO BERTRAND GUAY, AGENCE FRANCE PRESS ARCHIVE
Adèle Haenel at the Césars ceremony 2020
What Adèle Haenel rightly denounces is the culture of bof! about sexual harassment and sexual assault in France. The France of “Allez mon p’tit!” once intended by her boss for women, accompanied by a slap on the butt, preserved in more insidious forms. From the “freedom to bother” defended by Catherine Deneuve to the trivialization of rape by the psychoanalyst Sabine Prokhoris, to the nostalgia of the writer Frédéric Beigbeder for the time when women’s bodies could be objectified without wokes processing pork became.
The France of the timeless request for women to smile, be beautiful and keep silent, above all not to get angry or upset, otherwise they could be called hysterical or angry. A France that doesn’t seem ready to shed its macho reflexes.
Adèle Haenel, “who presents herself as a feminist and a lesbian,” “competes with anger,” writes Le Point magazine journalist Jean-Luc Wachthausen in a column that competes in sexism for speech about the actress. He briefly recalls the case of Christophe Ruggia, “the filmmaker against whom she filed a complaint almost 20 years later”. This is hardly an attempt to invalidate his statement…
Half a century ago, Delphine Seyrig, another major actress and feminist activist, was also accused of a dour tone for calling for equal rights for women in French society. “That is certainly the reason for the aggressiveness that the women’s liberation movement often displays and which is not sympathetic,” an interviewer on French public television told her in 1972 in an excerpt broadcast this week by the Institut national audiovisual. Jeanne Dielman from Chantal Akerman raises his arms and replies: “I don’t know if the calmness of the men is so sympathetic. »
“In the face of the bourgeoisie’s monopoly on speech and finance, I have no other weapons than my body and my integrity,” writes Adèle Haenel again in her letter to Télérama. From the culture of abandonment in the first sense: you have the money, the power and all the fame, you gurgle about it, but you don’t want me as a spectator. I erase you from my world. I go, I strike, I join my comrades for whom the search for meaning and dignity takes precedence over the search for money and power. »
French chroniclers have responded to his legitimate and courageous position, which expresses the fears, struggles and anxieties of his generation, with an ironic take on his anti-capitalist discourse.
His critics used the word “radical” to counter his letter, which was rebellious, coherent, logical and consistent with his social and political militancy.
“It’s too radical,” said actress-director Maïwenn on TV, whose latest film Jeanne du Barry, which opens Tuesday at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival, stars Johnny Depp, his ex’s domestic Violence is accused -wife. She also admitted to assaulting Mediapart director Edwy Plenel. Maïwenn was 16 when she married filmmaker Luc Besson, 17 years her senior. We suspect she doesn’t share all of Adèle Haenel’s ideas…
The two-time César winner (ten years ago for Mend the Living and the following year for The Fighters) is leaving the cinema. Fortunately, she will continue her work as a theater actress with Gisèle Vienne, notably in the play L’étang, which will be staged in Montreal at the end of the month as part of the Festival TransAmériques (which planned the event “Anniversaries of Adèle Haenel and #metoo”) .
The cinema lover that I am is of course disappointed by this decision. French cinema will regret the absence of this unique actress with her penetrating gaze and a radiant inner fire on the big screen. The citizen that I am admires his political position seething with anger that can no longer be deaf. Not too radical. Definitely radical.