Movies

French minister enters Césars row over Roman Polanski nominations


France’s culture minister has entered the row over Roman Polanski’s film J’accuse, saying that to give the controversial director a César – the French equivalent of an Oscar – would send the wrong signals.

Franck Riester’s comments came hours after Polanski, 87, said he would not attend Friday’s awards ceremony for fear of being subject to a “public lynching” by feminists.

Women’s rights activists are furious the judges gave the director’s latest film numerous nominations and have pledged to disrupt the ceremony.

“It’s for each judge to take responsibility. It would be a bad symbol given the necessary awareness we all need to have in the fight against sexual and gender-based violence,” Riester told France Info radio on Friday.

Polanski’s film, called An Officer and a Spy in English after the Robert Harris novel about the Dreyfus affair, has 12 nominations including for best film. It won two prizes at the Venice film festival, including best director.

The Franco-Polish director is still wanted in the US for the statutory rape of a 13-year-old in 1977. He had pleaded guilty and was awaiting sentencing when he fled the country. In November 2019, a second woman, the photographer Valentine Monnier, came forward to claim Polanski had raped her in 1975 when she was 18, a claim he has denied.

“Fantasies of unhealthy minds are now treated as proven facts,” Polanski said in a statement on Thursday. “We know how this evening will play out.”

This latest case has relaunched the debate over Polanski’s place in French – and world – cinema and whether his work can or should be regarded as separate from the man.

Protesters plan to stage a demonstration outside the venue in Paris on Friday evening. They have already sprayed anti-Polanski graffiti outside the venue and the headquarters of the French film academy, the Académie des Césars.

Adèle Haenel, the star of Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), which has also been nominated for a César, warned she would boycott the event if Polanski attended. She has accused another French director, Christophe Ruggia, of sexually harassing her when she was 12.

“Distinguishing Polanski is spitting in the face of all victims,” Haenel told the New York Times, adding that nominating him “means raping women isn’t that bad”.

“There is a #MeToo paradox in France: it is one of the countries where the movement was the most closely followed on social media, but from a political perspective and in cultural spheres, France has completely missed the boat.” She said France had failed to draw the line between “libertine behaviour” and “sexual abuse”.

The renewed controversy came weeks after the academy resigned en masse. Alain Terzian, its president, had defended the decision to honour Polanski’s film, saying it was not the institution’s role to take “a moral stance” when it came to awards. An open letter signed by more than 200 actors, producers and directors had demanded “profound reform” of the academy, saying it was stuck in the past and criticising its lack of transparency.

The French feminist group Osez le Féminisme (Dare to be Feminist) accused the Césars committee of being a “sexist institution that makes women invisible”.

France’s equality minister, suggested French cinema was still behind the times and had “yet to complete its awakening, its revolution”.

It is not the first time anger and protests centred on Polanski have disrupted the Césars. In 2017, Polanski was named to preside over the awards ceremony but stepped down after a wave of outrage.



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