Was Cannes really terrible for women?
Actress Jessica Chastain made news at the close of the Cannes Film Festival by unhappily observing what a raw deal women got in the movies she saw as a member of the Palme d’Or jury.
She spoke truth, but also begged two questions: Which films was she referring to, exactly?
And was Cannes 2017 really so terrible for women?
“This is the first time I’ve watched 20 films in 10 days, and I love movies,” she said Sunday evening, at the press conference following the awarding of the Palme and other prizes.
“And the one thing I really took away from this experience is how the world views women from the female characters that I saw represented,” she said.
“And it was quite disturbing to me, to be honest — and there are some exceptions, I will say.
“But for the most part, I was surprised with the representation of female characters on screen in these films. And I do hope that when we include more female storytellers, we will have more of the women that I recognize in my day-today life. Ones that are proactive, have their own agencies, don’t just react to the men around them. They have their own point of view.”
Chastain’s argument is unassailable when directed at the movie industry as a whole, especially when referring to the big Hollywood films that were nowhere to be seen at Cannes 2017.
Women are under-represented and often disrespected by the industry, both in front of the camera and behind it.
The biggest films are almost invariably blockbusters featuring mostly male superheroes directed by men — although just this week, ironically, the top movie opener is Wonder Woman, which stars a woman, Gal Gadot, and is directed by a woman, Patty Jenkins.
But I saw all of the Palme competition films that Chastain did (which actually numbered 19, not 20) and I would love to know more about which ones disturbed her.
To be sure, there were several films in the competition where women were treated as mere chattel in a domain ruled by selfish men. Among them were two biopics that were among the most critically reviled films at the fest.
Jacques Doillon’s Rodin, a biopic of sculptor Auguste Rodin, depicts Vincent Lindon’s title character as a man more interested in screwing around than sculpting, much to the fury of the woman in his life, his lover and fellow sculptor Camille Claudel (Izia Higelin), 25 years his junior. The press screening for Rodin had more walkouts that I’ve seen in 20 years of attending Cannes.
Michel Hazanavicius’ Le Redoutable is all about French New Wave icon Jean-Luc Godard, played by Louis Garrel, and his stormy relationship with actress Anne Wiazemsky (Stacy Martin), whom Godard directed ( La Chinoise, Weekend) and was married to for 12 years. A breezy story about a great man with a significantly younger wife whom he ignores and belittles, the film divided critics but mostly earned more brickbats than bouquets.
But there were many other films at Cannes where women had significant roles, two of which were honoured by Chastain’s jury: Sofia Coppola won Best Director for The Beguiled, a Civil War suspensor in which Nicole Kidman heads a southern all-girls school dispensing both care and justice to a male intruder, played by Colin Farrell; and Diane Kruger took Best Actress for her lead role in Fatih Akin’s In the Fade, playing a woman seeking payback for the terrorist bomb that killed her husband and young son.
Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi actioner Okja had fascinating women as both heroes and villains: Young South Korean star Ahn Seo-hyun was marvellous as the defender of a genetically modified giant pig whom Tilda Swinton’s over-the-top corporate boss was seeking to turn into bacon.
A lot of this comes down to perception, which is always a difficult thing to argue. Chastain is a woman and I’m a man, so she’s more attuned to the subtleties of female characters in films than I could ever hope to be, try though I might.
Chastain was spot-on when she observed there was a dearth of female storytellers in the Palme competition — just three of the 19 directors were women. But female directors don’t necessarily tell female stories: Lynne Ramsay tells a maledominated one with You Were Never Really Here, in which Joaquin Phoenix is a damaged hit man out to rescue an abducted girl. He won Best Actor and Ramsay won Best Screenplay from Chastain’s jury.
To be fair, Chastain’s comments about women brought nods of agreement from several of her fellow eight jurors, including jury president Pedro Almodovar. And juror Maren Ade, a German filmmaker, seconded Chastain’s call for more women directors in the competition: “We’re missing a lot of stories they might tell.”
However, the Palme competition is lacking in more than just female participation, as juror Will Smith noted.
“A couple of Black folks won’t hurt none for next year, either,” he said. “We’ll talk about that another time.”
To which Ade exclaimed: “True — Black women!”
These issues will never be resolved to everybody’s satisfaction. But sparking debate about how we view the world is something that Cannes and all great film festivals aspire to, and on this occasion, evidently succeeded. Follow Peter Howell on Twitter and Instagram @peterhowellfilm.