She is perhaps the greatest French actress of her generation. But Adèle Haenel has had enough. The 34-year-old actress had already turned her back on the cinema. Now she slams the door in his face.
On Tuesday, the artist and feminist activist responded to an interview request from the magazine Telerama by a punch letter in which she denounces the hypocrisy of the world of cinema. “I decided to politicize my stoppage of the cinema to denounce the general complacency of the profession vis-à-vis sexual aggressors and, more generally, the way in which this medium collaborates with the deadly racist ecocide order of the world as it is. is,” she wrote.
This smashing tone is not unusual for the actress of 120 beats per minute and of Portrait of the girl on fire. Three years ago, Adèle Haenel made a very noticeable outing in the middle of the Césars gala, while Roman Polanski received the prize for best director for I accuse. ” Shame ! “, she had launched when suddenly leaving the Salle Pleyel in the company of her ex-companion, the director Céline Sciamma. “Well done pedophilia! “, she added behind the scenes.
As Polanski’s most recent film was released, a fifth woman, photographer Valentine Monnier, accused the filmmaker of rape when she was 18. The four other accusers of the filmmaker were minors at the time of the alleged facts. In 1977, Roman Polanski was convicted of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor (Samantha Geimer, who was 13). He fled the United States for France after serving a 42-day prison sentence.
The impunity surrounding Polanski in France notably inspired a poignant video testimony by Adèle Haenel on the Mediapart news site in November 2019. Moved and determined, she accused director Christophe Ruggia of touching and sexual harassment on the making of the movie Devilswho revealed her in the early 2000s, when she was barely 12 years old.
Today, Adèle Haenel accuses the entire film industry of being an accomplice to sexual predators.
They and they all together during this time join hands to save the face of the Depardieus, the Polanskis, the Boutonnats. It bothers them, it bothers them that the victims make too much noise, they preferred that we continue to disappear and die in silence.
Adèle Haenel, in her letter
Thirteen women accused Gérard Depardieu of sexual violence last month, particularly on film sets, as part of another Mediapart investigation. Dominique Boutonnat, a donor to Emmanuel Macron’s presidential campaign, was reappointed head of the French National Cinema Center last July by the Council of Ministers, despite an imminent trial for sexual assault on his godson.
PHOTO BERTRAND GUAY, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
Adèle Haenel at the Césars ceremony in 2020
What Adèle Haenel rightly denounces is the culture of bof! surrounding sexual harassment and sexual assault in France. The France of “Allez mon p’tit!” once intended for women by their boss, accompanied by a pat on the buttocks, which remains in more insidious forms. From the “freedom to bother” defended by Catherine Deneuve to the trivialization of rape by the psychoanalyst Sabine Prokhoris, via the writer Frédéric Beigbeder’s nostalgia for the time when women’s bodies could be objectified without have pork processed by wokes.
The France of the timeless injunction to women to smile, to be beautiful and to keep quiet, above all not to get angry or upset, on pain of being called hysterical or angry. A France that does not seem ready to get rid of its macho reflexes.
Adèle Haenel, “who presents herself as a feminist and lesbian”, “competes with anger”, writes the journalist of the magazine Point Jean-Luc Wachthausen in a column that competes with sexism to talk about the actress. He briefly recalls the case of Christophe Ruggia, “filmmaker against whom she lodged a complaint almost 20 years later”. It’s not almost not an attempt to invalidate his testimony…
Half a century ago, Delphine Seyrig, another great actress and feminist activist, was also reproached with a surly tone because she demanded equality for women in French society. “This is surely the reason for the aggressiveness that the women’s liberation movement often has and which is not sympathetic,” an interviewer told her on French public television in 1972, in an extract broadcast this week by the Institut national audiovisual. Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman raises her arms and replies: “I don’t know if the calmness of men is so sympathetic. »
“Faced with the bourgeoisie’s monopoly of speech and finances, I have no other weapons than my body and my integrity,” Adèle Haenel wrote again in her letter to Telerama. Of the cancel culture in the first sense: you have the money, the strength and all the glory, you gargle about it, but you won’t have me as a spectator. I cancel you from my world. I leave, I go on strike, I join my comrades for whom the search for meaning and dignity takes precedence over that of money and power. »
To his legitimate and courageous position, which crystallizes the fears, struggles and apprehensions of his generation, French chroniclers have responded by ironizing his anti-capitalist discourse.
To his rebellious, coherent, logical and consistent letter with his social and political militancy, his detractors opposed the word “radical”.
“It’s too radical,” said actress and director Maïwenn on a TV set, whose most recent film, Jeanne du Barry, which will be presented at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday, features Johnny Depp, accused of domestic violence by his ex-wife. She also admitted having assaulted the director of Mediapart, Edwy Plenel. Maïwenn was 16 when she married filmmaker Luc Besson, 17 years her senior. We guess that she does not share all the ideas of Adèle Haenel…
The double winner of a César award (for mend the living ten years ago and The fighters the following year) leaves the cinema. She will happily continue her work as an actress in the theater with Gisèle Vienne, notably in the play the pondwhich will be presented at the end of the month in Montreal, as part of the Festival TransAmériques (which has scheduled the event “Adèle Haenel and #metoo anniversaries” on June 3).
The cinephile that I am is of course disappointed with this decision. French cinema will regret the absence on the big screen of this unique actress, with a piercing gaze, inhabited by a dazzling inner fire. The citizen that I am, he admires his political position boiling with anger that could no longer be deaf. Not too radical. Definitely radical.