France is still grappling with its #MeToo movement

On February 28, The César Awards, which are essentially the French Oscars, awarded the Best Director honor to Roman Polanski — a man who fled the United States after pleading guilty to the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1977. The César Awards voting body began defending their 12 nominations of Polanski’s film weeks before, saying that they “should not take moral positions” when evaluating the film. In response, however, the César Awards board resigned in early February over the decision. Hundreds of French cinema figures penned an open letter condemning the awards as well, criticizing the Awards’ “opaque decision-making process” and calling the César academy “a vestige of an era we would like to be over.”

This backlash continued at the awards ceremony itself. The host of the show, actor and comedian Florence Foresti, took shots at Polanski in her opening monologue, addressing the audience as, “predators, producers, gentlemen with an electronic bracelet…” and then instructing the audience not to clap for Polanski, nor any mention of his film. Polanski himself declined to attend the awards, fearing for his safety due to the hordes of protestors outside the event venting their fury toward the controversial director.

When Polanski’s win for Best Director was announced, several members of the audience followed the lead of Adèle Haenel, nominee for Best Actress for her performance in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, who left her seat, and then the Salle Pleyel concert hall, where the event was held. She was trailed by the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma, as well as her co-star, Noémie Merlant, amid the audience’s boos. As Haenel reached the lobby of the event space — outside of which gathered protestors — she began chanting “bravo le pédophile,” reprimanding the ceremony for its failure of accountability for continuing to celebrate Polanski. Foresti also elected not to return to the stage following Polanksi’s win.

Haenel faced some backlash for her decision. French casting director Olivier Carbone essentially wrote of Haenel’s protest as career suicide, stating on social media that, “Given my sources Haenel, you will have a good surprise very soon, with a good omerta, a well-deserved dead career that hangs in his face.” If anything illustrates France’s stagnation to progress, it’s that to some people, a woman who walked out of an award show in protest of abuse is assumed to have a dead career, but a convicted rapist can still thrive.

Still, Haenel isn’t one to shy away from openly casting light on abuse and demanding accountability, as she has spoken out about being a survivor of abuse. In a 2019 story for the French website Mediapart, Haenel detailed the abuse she experienced between the ages of 12 and 15 at the hands of French filmmaker Christophe Ruggia, and her desire not to go to court because of her belief that the legal system fails women. After the story went public, the Paris prosecutors’ office opened an investigation into the claims, and Ruggia was removed from the French Directors’ Association. The French Directors’ Association doubled down on their position by coming out in support of Haenel.

According to Haenel, France has fallen short of adequately grappling with the global #MeToo movement. In a recent interview with the New York Times, she expressed that France “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 added that “distinguishing Polanksi is spitting in the face of all the victims,” and that France hasn’t effectively distinguished between “libertine behavior” and “sexual abuse.” France’s Gender Equality Minister, Marlène Schiappa, condemned Polanksi’s nomination outright, echoing Haenel by saying that it should be “impossible that a hall gets up and applauds the film of a man accused of rape several times.”

Situations like this breathe life into the long-debated conversation about whether or not it’s possible to separate art from the artist. The former Césars voting body decided the separation is possible, but the audience inside the event and the enraged public outside clearly disagreed. If people like Adèle Haenel are positioned as figureheads in a reinvigorated #MeToo movement, it’s fair to believe that a cultural and ethical revolution may be burgeoning — and if so, it is in good hands.