Fury as Cannes shaves pounds off screen siren for poster
SHE was one of the most glamorous Italian stars of the 1960s, but a Cannes Film Festival poster of a “slimmed down” image of Claudia Cardinale has provoked outrage.
Feminists and the French media condemned the 2017 festival for transforming the iconic photograph of a youthful Cardinale, swirling her skirt on a Rome rooftop in 1959, into what they said was an unrealistic, unhealthy representation of the female form.
However, the 78-year-old actress, an outpsoken advocate of women’s rights, dis- missed the controversy as a “fake row”, saying the indignation was misplaced. Newspaper Le Monde showed how the image had been altered to make Cardinale’s waistline and thighs appear thinner. “What a pity,” it commented. Critics pointed to what they claim is the harmful impact of images of excessively thin women – a highly sensitive issue in France, which has banned “unhealthily” skinny fashion models to avoid “glorifying anorexia”. The disease affects up to 40,000 Frenchwomen.
Claire Serre-Combe, of Osez Le Feminisme (Dare to be Feminist), said it was scandalous that Cardinale, famous for her hourglass figure, should be forced to “lose kilos” for the poster.
Social media users railed at “the dictatorship of thinness”.
Cardinale was unimpressed. “This image has been retouched to accentuate this effect of lightness and transpose me into a dream character,” she said.
“This concern for realism has no place here and, as a committed feminist, I see no affront to the female body. There are many more important things to discuss in our world. It’s only cinema.”
In a statement released by the festi- val, Cardinale said she was honoured to feature on the poster for its 70th anniversary event in May.
She added that the image of her rooftop dance in Rome, at the age of 21, “reminds me of a time when I could never have imagined climbing up the redcarpeted steps [in Cannes]”.
The festival’s director, Thierry Fremaux, said the poster had been “very well received”.
Named by the Los Angeles Times Magazine in 2011 as one of the 50 most beautiful women in film history, Tunisian-born Cardinale appeared in some of the most acclaimed films of the 1960s and 1970s, including The Pink Panther, with Peter Sellers. She also featured in Blindfold with Rock Hudson in 1965, The Professionals and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.