Maybe you don’t have to read too much into this prelude. But there is a certain irony in opening a film festival with a historical drama about a dying reign – in a year that, according to Cannes boss Thierry Frémaux, should actually stand for change.
In interviews, Frémaux had even announced a new phase for Cannes from 2023 to 2027, as if a film festival were a superhero franchise. Or did Frémaux indirectly want to herald the end of his own reign over world cinema?
But that’s the thing with change. Judging by the opening film “Jeanne du Barry” by the French director Maïwenn, it is more likely to be said that it follows the tradition of Cannes opening films: pompous star cinema with show values, but told in a careful manner and therefore effective enough to get the film out of the festival to start directly in French cinemas. (The requirement for opening films on the Croisette)
But even the star of the film is difficult to associate with a change in mentality: the fact that Frémaux offers Johnny Depp, who has fallen out of favor in Hollywood, a stage for his comeback in Cannes is seen quite critically outside of France.
The boss himself said in the press conference on Monday that Depp only interested him as an actor. The allegations of domestic abuse by his ex-wife Amber Heard are still in the air after the trial, especially since Depp’s cynical behavior in court has done considerable damage to his image.
In “Jeanne du Barry”, Johnny Depp plays King Louis XV, the penultimate pre-revolutionary ruler of France, who has a courtly system that gives him a never-ending supply of young women to pass the time. Anyone who spontaneously thinks of Jeffrey Epstein is not entirely wrong.
Depp portrays the horny ruler in a very Johnny Depp-like manner as a super self-ironic ruler with all sorts of whims; for example, his subordinates may only back away from him in double steps. In other words: its promiscuous king, who at the end of his life was only called “the unloved” by the people, remains a completely unproblematic historical figure.
For a change of times it is not necessarily a contemporary approach to tell about courtly rituals and intrigues in such a bizarre and affirmative way; Especially not after really great films like “The Favorite” or “Corsage”.
And especially not when the director is actually concerned with a story of female empowerment. Maïwenn also plays the title character, an orphan from a poor background who makes a name for himself in high society as a courtesan and eventually even impresses the king. Jeanne is ordered to Versailles, where she becomes the king’s “favourite mistress”. Maïwenns Jeanne is, so to speak, a socially upwardly mobile sex worker who – by her own admission – does not get naked for everyone.
A woman in the shadow of her king
But that’s the end of female self-empowerment, which is otherwise only expressed in the fact that Jeanne likes to wear her hair open on ceremonial occasions. Much to the displeasure of the king’s daughters in particular, who bully the “unworthy” at every opportunity and even involve Marie Antoinette, who is married by marriage, in their intrigues.
In any case, there are no traces of female solidarity in “Jeanne du Barry”. This, in turn, suits Maïwenn, who also sees her own rising star as the child of an Algerian mother as the triumph of a lone fighter; and MeToo not as an error in the system, but as an expression of a lack of assertiveness and excessive sense of entitlement. What you can accuse other women who don’t have a king by their side.
In this respect, the 76th Cannes Film Festival, in which seven female directors are in competition for the first time, starts with a clear discord. Like her character Jeanne, Maïwenn feels visibly more comfortable in the circle of powerful men who still decide the fate of the French film industry than in the company of women who insist on their right to participate.
This year, King Thierry pays his respects to seven of them. He says he doesn’t expect any gratitude for this, but he does feel like a little sun king.
And the festival almost didn’t take place at all. Catherine Deneuve, invited on stage as a surprise guest by the presenter, her daughter Chiara Mastroianni, to honor honorary award winner Michael Douglas, will recite a poem by the Ukrainian poet Lessia Oukraïnka in memory of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
She is just about to hurry off the stage when the bystanders remember that she forgot the most important thing: to announce the official start of the festival. In turbulent times like these, such rituals have a stabilizing function.
