The lasting image of Cannes 2018 will be that of 82 women standing hand in hand on the red carpet on May 12 in a silent protest against gender disparity. They represented the 82 female directors who’ve been in competition in Cannes’ 71-year history compared to the almost 1,700 men.
At Cannes last year, Jessica Chastain had questioned the lopsided representation of women. She said that watching all the competition films left her disturbed at how the world viewed us. She said she wanted more of the women that she encountered in daily life to inhabit the screen, women with their own agency rather than those just reacting to men. Last year many of us had also applauded Harvey Weinstein for taking on Donald Trump on the issue of native Americans.
One year has made for a lot of change. With the lid off Weinstein’s sexual harassment offences, with #MeToo and #TimesUp movements gaining ground, the issue had to come knocking at Cannes’ door too, especially when it has had a dismal record of giving space to women filmmakers.
It’s in this context that another telling visual this year has been that of the Palme D’Or jury at the opening press conference. The president of the main competition jury, actor-producer Cate Blanchett, sat between two men (writer-directors Denis Villeneuve and Andrey Zvyagintsev) and two women (writer-director-producer Ava DuVernay and actor Léa Seydoux) to her right and another two men (director-writer-producer Robert Guédiguian and actor Chang Chen) and two women (actor Kristin Stewart and author, composer Khadja Nin) to her left. It was all, quite clearly, about trying to strike a balance of power.
Events, images, people, films, talks and interviews — everything in Cannes screamed gender this year. A statement read by Blanchett and documentary filmmaker Agnes Varda on the red carpet said: “Women are not a minority in the world, yet the current state of our industry says otherwise… As women, we all face our own unique challenges, but we stand together on these stairs today as a symbol of our determination and commitment to progress. The stairs of our industry must be accessible to all. Let’s climb.” A helpline has been set up at the festival to report sexual harassment following accusations of four assaults by Weinstein there in the past.
But can these powerful images and statements and initiatives be enough? Can they become more than mere tokenisms? The gender question is loaded with ambiguities and complications in Cannes this year as it has been in the past. As it is in life in general.
For all the women joining hands in protest there have also been some boycotting the festival because of the presence of filmmaker Lars von Trier. Von Trier, who was listed persona non grata by the festival a few years ago for favouring Hitler, returned this year despite sexual harassment charges levelled against him by many, including Björk who was the star of his Dancer in the Dark .
A night with Harvey
Also, the closing film at the festival was Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. This, when Gilliam is known to have made light of the charges against Weinstein by dismissing his victims as “adults with a lot of ambition.” “Harvey opened the door for a few people, a night with Harvey — that’s the price you pay…” he is reported to have said in one of his interviews. And then there are the cold facts. Despite the “female majority” jury and the seeming balance of power, Cannes couldn’t shrug off the fact that of the 21 in the main competition this year only three films are by women directors — Girls of the Sun by Eva Husson, Capernaum by Nadine Labaki, and Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzaro) by Alice Rohrwacher.
Meanwhile, this weekend will decide if Jane Campion will continue to remain the only woman to have won the Palme D’Or for her 1993 film The Piano or if she will finally find some company.
Blanchett admitted that she would want to see more women directors but the change can’t happen overnight. “They [women filmmakers] are not there because of their gender. They are there because of the quality of their work. We will assess them as filmmakers, as we should,” she said.
Woman’s only?
And then there are the larger questions. What were the gender issues in the bunch of films this year and what roles did women play? Is gender a woman’s only thing? Why should only women be expected to make “women-oriented” films?
Kenya’s Wanuri Kahiu, in the centre of controversy in her country for making Rafiki, a film on a lesbian relationship that features in the Un Certain Regard section, wants to make a sci-fi next but refuses to give up her gender-sexuality eye view. “I will always approach the subject with that perspective,” she told us in an interview.
While Kahiu faces a ban on her film, closer home Nandita Das’s Manto dwells on the larger issue of freedom of expression. She shows Saadat Hasan Manto as a brilliant mind, a fallible guy, and also as a feminist, one who shares a great camaraderie with his wife Safiya. Going a step ahead, Das chose the film’s première in a Un Certain Regard to put the spotlight on the two men behind her — her father, the “Manto of her family,” artiste Jatin Das; and her son Vihaan, who was a part of the making of the film, sleeping in the editing suite while the film took shape.
Satirising patriarchy
If women shouldn’t be boxed into ‘feminist subjects’ then can men render gender issues more compellingly on screen? While Husson’s Girls of the Sun, being pitched as a Palme D’Or contender, disappointed me with its simplistic and manipulative telling of the tale of Kurdish women taking on the IS, playing on the familiar stereotyping of the mother-warrior, it was the quiet subversion and satirising of patriarchy in Jafar Panahi’s Three Faces that reached out, where the filmmaker gently guides the gender question without asserting himself or getting on the driver’s seat.
Two of the strongest women on screen in Cannes have featured in works by men — Joanna Kulig as the beautiful Zula, clinging on to her love in politically tough times in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War and Tao Zhao, effortlessly managing the gambling dens and mercurial men in Jia Zhangke’s Ash Is Purest White. Should cinema then be gendered at all?
Mid-way into the festival a new charter was unveiled, aiming at improving gender parity at Cannes, which is expected to be adopted by other leading film festivals. Under the charter, Cannes will record the gender of the cast and crew of all films submitted, make public the names of selection committee members, and work towards gender parity on the Cannes board. Maybe such affirmative action is a better approach.
Meanwhile, what of the viewer? Shouldn’t one have boycotted Lars von Trier? Or walked out rather than be willingly hypnotised by his tremendous craft, despite being conscious of its underlying sadism? This festival has been as much about looking inwards into one’s own feminist heart as it has been about pointing a finger at Cannes, and the world, in general.
