Cannes is Not a ‘Festival for Rapists,’ says Festival Boss; Defends Johnny Depp’s Return to the Croisette

Johnny Depp is all set to make his career comeback with a French historical costume drama, Jeanne du Barry, which has been chosen as the 76th Cannes Film Festival’s opening night film on Tuesday. But a day before Depp walks the festival’s famed red carpet with his actress daughter, Lily Rose Depp, controversy swirled around his presence at the Croisette, the two-kilometer long road that stretches along the Mediterranean Sea and where Palais des Festivals, the film festival’s venue, is located. 

At the traditional pre-festival press meet on Monday, the usually unfazed festival chief Thierry Frémaux was besieged by questions about planned protests by French workers’ unions, the festival’s stand on the Hollywood writers’ strike, its response to a French actress’ open letter accusing the festival of defending “rapists” and Johnny Depp.

Responding to a question by an American journalist about why the Depp-starrer Jeanne du Barry had been picked as the festival’s opening film, Frémaux said, “I don’t know about the image of Johnny Depp in the U.S. To tell you the truth, in my life, I only have one rule, it’s the freedom of thinking and the freedom of speech and acting within a legal framework.”

In Jeanne du Barry, made by French actor-director Maïwenn, Depp, 59, plays King Louis XV. Maïwenn plays the film’s titular lead, Jeanne Bécu, the French king’s last official mistress.

Defending the festival’s reputation and their choice of opening film, Frémaux said, “If Johnny Depp had been banned from acting in a film, or the film was banned, we wouldn’t be here talking about it. We saw Maïwenn’s film and it could have been in competition… This [controversy] came up once the film was announced at Cannes because everybody knew Johnny had made a film in France… I don’t know why she chose him, it’s a question you should ask Maïwenn… If there’s one person in this world who was least interested in this very publicized trial, it was me. I don’t know what it’s about. I just care about Johnny Depp as an actor.”

For over a decade, Depp lived in a $26 million, 37-acre property near Saint Tropez on the French Riviera. He put that on sale in 2015 and moved to Somerset, U.K., where he has an 850-acre estate.

Once one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors whose performance as Jack Sparrow turned Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean into one of the world’s most successful franchises, Depp’s career has been in decline since 2016 when his acrimonious divorce with Amber Heard was finalized, but it went into a free-fall when, two years later, Heard accused him of domestic abuse. 

Disney reportedly dropped Depp four days after Heard’s 2018 op-ed appeared in the Washington Post in which she claimed, without naming Depp, that she was a victim of domestic violence.

Apart from his appearances at their highly publicized trials over accusations of abuse and defamation, Depp hasn’t appeared in any significant film since the 2018 Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. But that deal too soured as sordid details of the couple’s troubled marriage, Depp’s behavior on film sets and his spending behavior were televised to the world.

In 2020, as damaging revelations — including how Depp would be late and unprepared on sets and would often rely on an earpiece to feed him lines, and that his full-time staff reportedly cost $300,000 per month — polarized fans and a British court ruled against him in a defamation case over The Sun referring to him as a “wife-beater,” Warner Bros. replaced him in the Fantastic Beasts franchise with Mads Mikkelsen.

Jeanne du Barry, which reportedly cost $22 million, will be Depp’s first film since the trial got over. It will get a 640-screen theatrical release in France on May 16th, the same day as its world premiere in Cannes. 

Its box-office collection in France, and how the over 2,000 journalists in attendance at Cannes review the film, will decide whether it gets a theatrical release in other countries or lands on OTT.

‘If you thought that it’s a festival for rapists…’

In 2019, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a lyrical, romantic, historical drama set in 18th century France starring Adèle Haenel, was competing for the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. But in March this year, two months before the festival, Haenel wrote an open letter in which she said that Cannes is “ready to do anything to defend their rapist chiefs.”

Talking to the press, Frémaux said on Monday that Haenel’s comments were “false.”

“She’s very radical, it’s an erroneous comment,” he said, and then added, “She didn’t think that when she came to Cannes, unless she suffered from a crazy dissonance… If you thought that it’s a festival for rapists, you wouldn’t be here listening to me, you would not be taking your accreditations and complaining that you can’t get tickets to get into screenings.”

In her letter, Haenel, 34, has called out the French film industry for supporting known sexual abusers like actor Gerard Depardieu, accused by 13 women of sexual misconduct, and director Roman Polanski, who raped a 13-year-old in 1977. 

In 2020, she walked out of the 2020 César Awards when Polanski was awarded the best director prize for An Officer and a Spy, and that same year she accused French director Christophe Ruggia of sexually assaulting her when she was 12 years old on the set of The Devils. The director has denied the charges.

In her letter, Haenel also announced her retirement from films. “I decided to politicize my retirement from cinema to denounce the general complacency of the profession towards sexual aggressors,” she wrote.

Women at Cannes 

For the first time in its history, this year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival features seven women directors in the main, 21-film competition section. Alice Rohrwacher (La Chimera), Jessica Hausner (Club Zero), Catherine Breillat (Last Summer), Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall), Ramata-Toulaye Sy (Banel et Adama), Kaouther Ben Hania (Four Daughters) and Catherine Corsini (Homecoming) will be vying for the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest honor, alongside acclaimed directors like Britain’s Ken Loach, Japan’s Kore-Eda Hirokazu and America’s Wes Anderson. 

But, as is the tradition at Cannes, this year’s glamorous black-and-white poster of actress, sex symbol and icon Catherine Deneuve at once strikes discordant notes.

The poster, draped across the facade of the festival’s main venue that reportedly weighs 145 kilos, and pasted inside many restaurants and shop windows, is a photo taken by Jack Garofalo on the set of the 1968 film, La Chamade, directed by Alain Cavalier. 

In it, Catherine Deneuve is standing on Pampelonne beach, near Saint-Tropez, and playing with her blonde hair. 

It’s chic, glamorous, sexy and honors Deneuve, considered one of the greatest French actresses who has worked with some of the best French directors, including Luis Bunuel (Belle de Jour/Beauty of the Day), Francois Truffaut (The Last Metro) and Jacques Demy (Umbrellas of Cherbourg). 

But in January 2018, Deneuve, now 79, had denounced the #MeToo movement because it was leading to “expeditious justice” against men “when their only wrong was to have touched a knee, tried to steal a kissing, talking about intimate things at a business dinner or sending sexually charged messages to a woman.”

Watch the trailer for Jeanne Du Barry below.