'Altar of great art': French cinema granted film veterans 'transcendent permission to be above law'

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00:00And joining me now is Dr. Mary Harrod, a French specialist from Warwick University in the UK.

00:05Dr. Harrod, thank you very much for your time. Again, just how significant

00:10is this case for the Me Too movement here in France?

00:16It's very significant for two reasons in particular, I think. Firstly, of course,

00:21Depardieu is the highest profile figure to have come under this kind of scrutiny, and indeed this

00:27confirms nobody's above the law. There have been some other relatively high profile

00:33individuals who have been prosecuted recently, including Dominique Boutonnard, the head of the

00:40Centre National de la Cinématographie, which is the French sort of funding body and very

00:46important agency for cinema, and also Nicolas Bédos. So both of them have been given

00:52suspended jail sentences, Nicolas Bédos being an actor, but Depardieu is a national treasure

00:59and his renown is, you know, on a different scale, especially internationally.

01:05Yes, I would say that, you know, it does highlight some of the strong links between

01:08sort of everyday misogyny, pushing of boundaries, something that Depardieu is known for in general,

01:14for transgressing in all kinds of ways in professional circumstances, and, you know,

01:21breaking the law, illegal abuse, where is the boundary? I think that this is something that's

01:25very much to the fore in this case. Yeah, Gerard Depardieu has faced numerous

01:29allegations in recent years, has he not? Yeah, I mean, as your previous speaker mentioned, he

01:35may come on trial for rape accused by Charles Arnaud, and, you know, depending on the outcome

01:41of this case, one of the immediate implications will be that it's more likely, surely, that this

01:46will indeed come to trial. But yeah, I think it's also just about the culture. I mean,

01:54I know Greenberg has actually spoken about the way that Depardieu has become worse in the way

01:59that he behaves quite openly on set, you know, sort of roping, this kind of thing is what he's

02:05been accused of, you know, just speaking salaciously. And she said, that's because of

02:10the permission he's been given by the context that he's working in. And that's the really

02:14significant part. The reality is, though, is that the Me Too movement here in France has not

02:19had the same resonance as it's had in other parts of the world,

02:24especially as it seems to be mainly restricted to the French film industry.

02:31Yeah, that is very interesting. And, you know, one other thing to hope is that other people

02:36who are currently being looked at, you know, Jacques Douallon, Benoit Jacob, Christophe Roudier,

02:44of course, you know, if they're guilty, Roudier was accused by Adèle Haenel in 2020 of sexual

02:51abuse when she was a minor. And that's, you know, still hasn't come to trial. So we'd hope that

02:56would open the door for looking more widely. And I think there are particular reasons it's been so

03:01slow. And that's to do partly with the status of cinema as art in France, which is enshrined by

03:07public policy, state subsidies, looking at it as the seventh art. And this idea, you know, that

03:14anything can be sacrificed on the altar of great art. And Depardieu is more than just an actor,

03:19he's known for authoring his parts, being a kind of creative genius. And that, I think, has given

03:25him, you know, potentially given not only him, but people in this industry, an idea of kind of

03:31transcendent permission to be above the law and to behave as they will in the service of craft.

03:38It's interesting too that Depardieu's parts very often are very macho figures. So that line between

03:43fact and fiction is never quite as clear as you might think.

03:47But in recent months, this country has been shocked by the Giselle Pellicot case.

03:53Has that case changed the dynamic in terms of French people now looking at sexual assault cases

03:59from the perspective of the victim instead?

04:04I would hope so. I mean, you might think that the Giselle Pellicot case has very little to do with

04:11a case of sexual assault. You know, obviously, it's an aberrant and abject, extreme and unusual

04:18set of events. But what is really disturbing, I think, is that the defense lawyers in that case

04:25have very closely looked at Giselle Pellicot's private life. There's been an attempt to victim

04:32blame her, suggest she might not have been unconscious. You know, in some ways, she was

04:36willing, which seems particularly ludicrous in this case. And this has led a lot of activists,

04:42feminist activists to accuse the justice system of being out of touch.

04:46But it really shows that it's a spectrum. You know, if you can blame a woman, a woman in this

04:51scenario, it's no wonder that whenever there are what are seen as more minor charges and gray areas,

04:56or, you know, I was just making a joke or the person was complicit and it was banter.

05:02Of course, women is often blamed. And that is a recurrent theme of, unfortunately, you know,

05:07rape and sexual assault trials throughout the world. Yeah, so I think things are changing

05:12in France and some human rights campaigners involved with the Perico case have said that

05:16actually there is more openness to prosecuting sexual abusers and assaulters since Me Too,

05:24but it's just very gradual and slow. And this would be, I think, a major milestone in that,

05:28if Depardieu is found guilty. Thank you so much. That's Dr Mary Harrod from

05:33Warwick University on the Gerard Depardieu case.

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