Adèle Haenel is a 34-year-old French actress. She’s been working since she was a kid, but she’s probably best known to international audiences for her stunning turn in 2019’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. In 2020, she filed charges against French director Christophe Ruggia for sexually assaulting her when she was 12 years old and working with Ruggia in The Devils. She’s been nominated for multiple Cesar awards and won two Cesars, and she was the sole actress who stormed out of the 2020 Cesar Awards when Roman Polanski won the Best Director Cesar. She has been an outspoken advocate for #MeToo in the French film industry for years. And now she’s retiring from acting because she can’t deal with the misogyny within her industry.
French actress Adèle Haenel, the star of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, has announced her retirement from the movie business, saying the complacency and indifference of the French industry to the #MeToo movement is behind her decision.
In a letter published on media news site Télérama on Tuesday, Haenel she wanted to use the public declaration of her retirement from the film business as a way to call out the “general complacency” within the French industry “vis-à-vis sexual aggressors.”
Despite several high-profile examples of sexual abuse and misconduct within the French film industry, many of which came to light in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Haenel says the powers that be have chosen to ignore and ostracize women who have come forward to sound the alarm. “They join hands [to protect] the [Gerard] Depardieus, the [Roman] Polanskis, the [Dominique] Boutonnats,” she writes in her Télérama letter, referencing three of the most prominent French film figures accused of abuse. “It bothers them that the victims make too much noise. They preferred that we disappear and die in silence.”
Those with power inside the industry have effectively “canceled” the French #MeToo movement, Haenel writes. “You have the money, the strength, and all the glory [but] you won’t have me as a spectator. I cancel you from my world.”
In 2020, Haenel stormed out of the 45th César Awards — France’s Oscars — when Roman Polanski was awarded the best director prize for his new film An Officer and a Spy. The actor shouted “shame!” as she left, followed by her Portrait of a Lady director Céline Sciamma.
[From THR]
I have so much admiration for Haenel, especially given the even more pervasive misogyny within the French film industry. Like, Hollywood is sexist as hell and there are so many powerful men who still protect abusers within the industry… but in Hollywood, victims do have some power and they have a voice and they are believed. There was a genuine shift in 2017/2018 where Hollywood women began standing up for themselves and for each other. That hasn’t happened in the French film industry – the handful of victims/survivors who have told their stories are dismissed and marginalized. Even at this year’s Cesar Awards, the entire audience gave a huge ovation to Brad Pitt, someone who physically, emotionally and financially abused his ex-wife.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
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