Tonie Marshall, 68: French filmmaker who took on sexism
Tonie Marshall, a French American filmmaker and actress and the only female director to win a Cesar award, France’s equivalent of the Oscars, died Thursday in Paris. She was 68.
France’s Equalities Ministry, which oversees matters of gender equality, confirmed the death but gave no further details, The Associated Press reported.
Marshall was not well known outside France, but at home she was a prominent woman in the male-dominated French film industry.
Though she resisted being labeled a feminist, she confronted sexism head-on in her later movies. She became a vocal supporter of the French #MeToo movement and helped open up the industry to more women.
After 30 years as an actress and 10 as a director, Marshall created a sensation in 1999 with her movie “Venus Beauty Institute,” about three women who work in a beauty salon and their search for love and happiness.
It swept the top three Cesar awards — for best film, best director and best original screenplay (by Marshall) — and one of its protagonists, Audrey Tautou, won the Cesar for most promising new actress.
Marshall researched the film by frequenting her local beauty salon, watching the interplay of clients and employees, and listening to their dialogue.
One day a woman came in, removed her top and bra, and sat there naked in what Marshall saw as a display of power, not exhibitionism; the scene is replicated in the movie.
Her cinematic style was deeply influenced by director Jacques Demy, who most famously directed “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (1964) and “The Young Girls of Rochefort” (1967).
But in “Venus Beauty Institute,” Marshall paid direct homage to another French film that examined love from a woman’s point of view — “Belle de Jour” (1967), directed by Luis Bunuel and starring Catherine Deneuve.
Marshall was especially enthralled by a famous scene in “Belle de Jour” in which Deneuve, playing a bourgeoise wife who is secretly a prostitute, is given a small, lacquered box by a client.
She opens and closes it, without the audience seeing what is inside. Another character asks her how she can have sex with the unappealing man who gave it to her. “What do you know about love?” Deneuve’s character responds.
The scene was one of her inspirations in making “Venus.” After seeing “Belle de Jour,” Marshall told Cineaste magazine in 2000, “I was left wondering, ‘What do I know about love?’ ”
Marshall was born on Nov. 29, 1951, in Neuillysur-Seine, just west of Paris. She grew up in the movie business, the daughter of Micheline Presle, a French film actress, and William Marshall, an American actor, director and producer who was once married to Ginger Rogers.