When Johnny Depp appeared on the red carpet at the Cannes film festival this week it was clear France was doing more than any other nation to rehabilitate the actor after he was dropped by US film studios during two trials over alleged domestic abuse.
Feminist groups and more than 100 French actors spoke out to criticise the festival, saying Depp’s star appearance symbolised a wider problem of the French establishment protecting men who have been accused by women. “We are deeply outraged and refuse to remain silent in the face of the toxic politics espoused by the Cannes film festival,” actors said in an open-letter published in Libération.
Depp, who at Cannes dismissed allegations against him as “abstract whispers” and said he “no longer needed Hollywood”, has anchored his cinema comeback firmly in France. His first film role in three years is a French-speaking part as King Louis XV in the movie Jeanne du Barry; and he is seeking funding in France for his next film as a director, a feature about the artist Amedeo Modigliani, set in Paris.
Depp’s suits at Cannes were provided by the French luxury brand Dior, which has given him a record $20m deal to continue advertising its men’s fragrance, Dior Sauvage, pleased that the sales of the scent had risen despite the two trials – one for libel, the other for defamation – over alleged violent abuse against his ex-wife Amber Heard.
In Paris, billboards, metro stations and buses were plastered with Depp’s face in ads for Jeanne du Barry, which opened in France this week but does not yet have a US release date.
Depp, who once lived in France and has two children with the French actor Vanessa Paradis, has said the country “feels like home”.
In 2020, a British court ruled that the Sun newspaper did not libel Depp by calling him a “wife beater” because the judge found it was “substantially true” and that 12 out of 14 incidents of assault reported by Heard were proved. Depp then sued Heard for libel in the US last year over a Washington Post editorial she had written. Virginia jurors ruled in his favour on three counts, awarding him more than $10m, and against him on one count, awarding Heard $2m.
In Nice, along the coast from Cannes, protesters posted anti-festival signs on walls. One read: “Festival of rapists, misogynists and arseholes.”
Tension was high at the festival. Maïwenn, the director and co-star of Jeanne du Barry, said she cast Depp before the trials began.
Edwy Plenel, the editor-in-chief of the investigative website Mediapart, described how he had filed a legal complaint against Maïwenn after she spat on him earlier this year. He told Variety that Maïwenn was “outspokenly anti-#MeToo” and he believed she had targeted him because of Mediapart’s investigations into sexual assault allegations in the film industry, including against her ex-husband Luc Besson, who denied all allegations against him. Maïwenn told journalists she did not regret the Plenel incident.
The French actor Ariane Labed and the Franco-British actor Olivia Ross, who wrote the open letter signed by 123 actors warning against a French film industry supporting abusers, said they had spoken out after hearing accounts from other actors of sexual abuse, bullying and racism in the industry.
Ross said: “The #MeToo movement has had an impact, things are slowly shifting, but the Cannes film festival making these choices is a clear slap in the face and a clear statement of: ‘We’re not interested in that change.’ That’s how we perceive it and we think that’s unacceptable.
“France has a reputation as a country which prioritises the auteur and seeks to separate the art from the artist all the time. That has its place, but it should not be systematic. We wanted to say: we are French and we don’t stand by these choices.”
They said they also wanted to express support for Adèle Haenel, the star of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, who recently announced she would leave the industry because of its “general complacency” towards sexual predators.
Labed said: “We wanted to stand with her, to say: we understand and share her anger and we want to be heard.”
The feminist group Osez Le Féminisme called for a boycott of Cannes, saying France had a history of supporting men such as Roman Polanski. The Polish-born director fled from the US to France in 1978 after admitting to the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl and has been a fugitive from the US justice system since, despite repeated attempts to have him extradited.
The group also criticised the French film industry for continuing to work with Gérard Depardieu. The actor is under investigation for an alleged rape in 2018, which he denies, and was more recently accused of sexually inappropriate behaviour by 13 women, which his lawyers denied.
The group’s spokesperson, Ursula Le Menn, said of Depp’s presence in Cannes: “We’re once again seeing what has happened in the past, namely with Polanski, that this country welcomes with open arms, applauds and celebrates men who are accused of being attackers.”
She said this was rooted in a “misogynist and patriarchal culture” in France, where “male artists are put on a pedestal, and it is claimed that the art justifies everything”.
