Walkouts as Polanski wins best director award at French Oscars
>>PARIS: Roman Polanski won best director for An Officer and a Spy at a fractious ceremony for the French Oscars, the Cesars, that ended with walkouts and recrimination in Paris early yesterday.
The entire French academy had been forced to resign earlier this month amid fury that the veteran — wanted in the US for the statutory rape of a 13-yearold girl in 1977 — had topped the list of nominations.
Protesters chanting “Lock up Polanski!” tried to storm the theatre where the ceremony was being held before being pushed back by police firing tear gas.
France’s Culture Minister Franck Riester had warned that giving the maker of “Rosemary’s Baby” a Cesar would be “symbolically bad given the stance we must take against sexual and sexist violence”.
But Polanski won two awards, best adapted screenplay and best director — with the latter prompting Adele Haenel, who was nominated for best actress for “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”, to storm out, crying “Shame!”
Haenel has become a hero of the #MeToo movement in France after accusing the director of her first film, Christophe Ruggia, of sexually harassing her when she was only 12.
Polanski’s film also picked up best costume design.
“Distinguishing Polanski is spitting in the face of all victims,” Haenel had said in the run-up to the Cesars. “It means raping women isn’t that bad.”
Polanski, 86, and the entire team of his historical drama had boycotted the ceremony, fearing a “public lynching”.
An Officer and a Spy is based on the Dreyfus affair which divided France in the late 19th century when a Jewish army officer was wrongly prosecuted for spying.
“What place can there be in such deplorable conditions for a film about the defence of truth, the fight for justice, [against] blind hate and anti-Semitism?” the director told AFP.
Polanski’s epic, which won two top prizes at the Venice film festival last year, was in the running in 12 categories at the Cesars.
But the big winner on the night was the Oscar-nominated Les Miserables, set in one of France’s deprived and restive suburbs.
It took best film and three other prizes including the audience award and its Mali-born director Ladj Ly made an appeal for unity on a highly fraught night, saying “our enemy is not the other, but poverty”.
“Papicha”, a touching story of Algerian women fighting for their freedom by Mounia Meddour, also fared well, winning both best first film and best female newcomer for actress Lyna Khoudri.
With the French film industry at war over Polanski, Hollywood star Brad Pitt also snubbed the event despite having been offered an honorary award.