As newbies to cancel culture, we do not know if it can be moved to the uncanceled category and how long it will take. Does being canceled proscribe or is it a condition that is acquired for life? Is redemption possible?
France forgives everything to geniuses and artists. Perhaps this is why many attempts at cancellations occur in French territory. Apparently a dark and sordid zone is granted to the creative impulse. A necessary evil. And many French people are willing to separate, with firewalls if necessary, the artist's life from his work. Let's say it is a pragmatic way to enjoy art without uncomfortable pangs of conscience.
It also serves to distance ourselves from the binary code with which it seems that the American industry and consumers organize the world: good and bad, white and black, canceled and activists. No gray pantones. A childish and not very complex universe.
The fact is that the recently concluded Venice International Festival has received with applause Woody Allen's latest film, Coup de Chance, shot entirely in French and on the streets of Paris, where the 87-year-old director has not only been able to work, but that it has been allowed to hire a top-level casting. The film will be released in European cinemas on September 27, but at the moment it will not be distributed to American theaters where Allen is, until proven otherwise, cancelled.
The last agreement that Allen signed with an American company ended in 2018 when Amazon terminated all contracts with the filmmaker amid the fallout from accusations of sexual abuse by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow. A documentary, an autobiography and a trial won by the filmmaker have not been enough to cancel the former revered director in his beloved Manhattan.
An article published in The Washington Post in 2018 left Johnny Deep without a job at the main Hollywood studios. It was not just any article, it was signed by his ex-wife, actress Amber Heard, and she accused him of physical and sexual abuse. Almost immediately Disney canceled an agreement for $22.5 million, which established that Depp would appear in the new installment of Pirates of the Caribbean.
Deep, who had a relationship with the Parisian singer and model Vanessa Paradis between 1998 and 2012, with whom he has two children and owns a villa near St Tropez, found relief in the European country when the company Why not Productions hired him to star. Jeanne du Barry, a period drama where Deep plays Louis XV, Louis the Beloved, the French leader of the Age of Enlightenment.
The film premiered at Cannes last May and was applauded for seven minutes by a standing audience. The results at the box office were excellent. It was her first important role in three years. Can we aspire to a greater redemption?
British historian Graham Robb, expert in French culture and author of the book The Discovery of France, explains to The New York Times this difference in treatment of male artists in France due to “the cultural differences” between both countries. “In France, artists have the right to be criminal, moody, imaginative. In short, not to be like the others.” To support his theory he quotes Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th century French poet, hedonist and opium smoker: “Breaking the rules is a sine qua non of artistic life.”
However, although the first reaction to the Me too movement in France was that famous 2018 letter in which several actresses, including Catherine Deneuve, defended the right to sexual freedom, several years later the first canceled ones also began to appear among the powerful men in France: the actor Gerad Depardieu, the writer Gabriel Matzneff - whose abuses were documented in the book Vanessa Springora's Consent, or the media sports journalist Pierre Ménès, suspended indefinitely by his employer after the publication of the documentary I am not a whore, I am a journalist, who denounced sexism in sports journalism.
None have yet been uncanceled nor have their sins been redeemed. It would seem that the French seem better willing to forgive the illustrious people canceled by Hollywood, or that they especially enjoy opposing the big film industry.
