Seven minutes of standing ovation, he hadn’t expected that. When you arrive from Puritan America, it creates a shock. Dark suit and straight hair tied at the back, the star did not pretend surprise. For once, the signs raised around him congratulated him. On the red carpet, the artist found his marks. Because we were in France.
The triumph reserved for actor Johnny Depp at Cannes on Tuesday for his role in Jeanne du Barry, by the director and actress Maïwenn, was not only a film and media event, it also illustrated a trait of civilisation. Indeed, we had to be in France for a film festival to allow itself to defy what will be said and political correctness by applauding the artist independently of his legal disputes with his former wife and the accusations of violence against him.
Far from petitions and matrimonial quarrels, Cannes has chosen to honor the artist. Only the artist. Just the artist!
Like Du Barry, this daughter of the people who shook up the court of Versailles by becoming the king’s mistress, Maïwenn shook up the mysteries of cinema by offering the role of Louis XV to the former Caribbean corsair. Banned from film sets in the United States for three years, Johnny Depp is the latest scapegoat for this new world we have entered in recent years. A world that no longer knows how to separate private life from professional life, where spectators are more than ever voyeurs inviting themselves into the bedrooms of their idols and where pious images have replaced the statuettes that once rewarded talent.
Despite the sinister episodes of Caesar and Molière plagued by militant radicalism – and shunned by the public – France is honored each time it resists this thought that wants an accusation to be worth condemnation and which ignores one of the foundations of justice: the presumption of innocence.
It honors itself even more each time it distinguishes art from private life and recognizes the genius of a Woody Allen and a Polanski — like yesterday that of a Chaplin fleeing McCarthyism — whereas, faithful to its Puritan tradition, Hollywood continues to claim patents of virtue from its laureates. Yesterday, those of anticommunism. Today, those of neo-feminism.
If Cannes had banned all the bad boys who, in their day, failed Hollywood’s morality tests, neither Robert Mitchum nor Richard Burton would have walked the red carpet. Without forgetting Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson and so many others. “I have only one conduct in life, the freedom to think, to speak, to act within the framework of the law”, declared Thierry Frémaux. By thus refusing ideological diktats, the General Delegate is reconnecting with the origins of the Cannes Film Festival.
Wasn’t the very idea of this artistic event born out of a desire to restore freedom to the cinema, after the 1938 episode of the Venice Film Festival which rewarded works marked politically by fascism, such as Luciano Serra, pilota film produced by Mussolini’s son celebrating the colonial conquest of Ethiopia, and Stadium Godsa Hitler propaganda documentary?
It is no coincidence that it was the Minister of National Education and Fine Arts Jean Zay who sponsored this initiative, which would only come to fruition after the war. Zay was a high official in the great French cultural tradition. A defender of secularism and of the republican school, he considered that the latter should “remain the inviolable asylum where the quarrels of men do not penetrate”. This man, who was not the type to bend to fashions, was moreover assassinated by the Vichy militias; his remains are now in the Pantheon.
By refusing to obey the injunctions of the morality of the day, the Festival is part of this proud tradition. As journalist Noémie Halioua recalled, those who signed a petition against Johnny Depp were hardly offended when the director of MiserablesLadj Ly, had been rewarded in 2020 despite being convicted of being an accomplice in the 2009 forcible confinement and beating of an individual whose only crime was to have seduced a friend’s sister and committed this called an “honour killing”.
How simple the world would be if only virtuous beings produced great works! We would no longer need literary and cinematographic reviews: it would suffice to read the legal chronicle.
This dream of a world where creative genius only falls to good souls and artistic mediocrity to bastards has hints of intolerance. Unfortunately for our censors, the world of men is far from resembling this Epinal image. This is why it is necessary to separate the work from the artist, under penalty of condemning masterpieces. But also to crown mediocre artists or, as is often the case, simple propagandists of the Good.