Time's Up - or is it? Why Cate Blanchett and co were up against it in Cannes

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Time's Up - or is it? Why Cate Blanchett and co were up against it in Cannes

When 82 women set out to square cinema's gender divide this week, the hurdles ahead were immediately and embarrassingly clear.

By Stephanie Bunbury

Funny how even the most well-meaning gestures can go just that little bit wrong. Last Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival, Cate Blanchett led 82 women working in jobs across the film industry in France and elsewhere to the foot of the Grand Lumiere Theatre's red-carpeted steps.

Turning away from the entrance to look back at the crowd, Blanchett and comrade-in-arms Agnes Varda, the 89-year-old New Wave veteran, together delivered a speech declaring that women were not a minority, that they should be better represented at all levels of the film industry, and that the marchers challenged all film institutions and themselves to ensure greater diversity in future.

Jury members, from left, Ava DuVernay, Robert Guediguian, Chang Chen, Cate Blanchett, Khadja Nin and Cannes Film Festival Director Thierry Fremaux with the 50/50 2020 Gender Equality Pledge.

Jury members, from left, Ava DuVernay, Robert Guediguian, Chang Chen, Cate Blanchett, Khadja Nin and Cannes Film Festival Director Thierry Fremaux with the 50/50 2020 Gender Equality Pledge.Credit: Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP

They turned back to the steps. "Let's climb!" said Blanchett. It was at this point that the DJ who pumps out the beats during gala red carpets chose to accompany them with Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman. Like it or not, this indubitably great pop song is nothing less than a street stalkers' anthem. "Pretty woman look my way/Pretty woman say you'll stay with me/'Cause I need you, I'll treat you right/Come with me baby, be mine tonight." Nice one, Cannes. Keep working on that sexism thing.

The march was framed as a protest but was really a festival event; the festival's director, Thierry Fremaux, has made a point of supporting talks and debates organised by 5050x2020, Women in Motion and similar initiatives. On Monday, Fremaux and the artistic directors of parallel programs Directors' Fortnight and Critics' Week became the first signatories of a charter – going by the grand title of Programming Pledge for Parity and Inclusion in Cinema Festivals – which sets out plans to improve gender equality in festival organisations and within the industry.

Jury members, from left, Kristen Stewart, Lea Seydoux, Khadja Nin, Ava DuVernay, Cate Blanchett and director Agnes Varda lead the 82-strong protest at Cannes.

Jury members, from left, Kristen Stewart, Lea Seydoux, Khadja Nin, Ava DuVernay, Cate Blanchett and director Agnes Varda lead the 82-strong protest at Cannes.Credit: AAP

You can question what these grand declarations of intent really signify. There are just three (out of 21) films by women in competition this year. Over the festival's 71 years, there have been 82 – hence the march numbers. The document drawn up by 5050x2020 commits the three Cannes artistic directors to compiling statistics on the gender of the filmmakers and crews of all films submitted for inclusion; to listing the members of programming committees; and to working towards equal numbers on their various boards. It won't affect which films we actually see. Anyway, none of these promises can be enforced.

There is symbolic change everywhere, however, beginning with Blanchett's choice of a used dress in sober #TimesUp black for opening night. Signs and headlines tell their own story. "Talent is not Gender Specific" announces the poster for Madame magazine. A billboard pitches an unknown documentary called Female Pleasure. And almost the only sign of life on the sluggish Cannes market, says the Hollywood Reporter, is a $US20-million sale of US rights to an all-female action film starring Jessica Chastain, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Fan Bingbing and Lupita Nyong'o called 355 that doesn't even have a script yet.

That news brought to mind the festival's opening night – and how long ago that seems now – where the audience was shown highlights of jury president Cate Blanchett's career. These included her Oscar acceptance speech in 2014 when she urged the audience to recognise that films with women at the centre are not "niche experiences". Audiences would go to see films with women in the lead, she insisted. "And, in fact, they earn money."

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That was only four years ago, but surely nobody would bother pressing that argument now. Most films being shown in Cannes this year would have been conceived before the Weinstein revelations in October last year unleashed the Time's Up movement – seven months is nothing in film gestation time. But it is striking how many male directors are telling stories led by women. Icelandic director Benedikt Erlingsson's comic fable Woman at War, about a middle-aged woman who sabotages power lines feeding the four private aluminium smelters in Iceland, is the current hit of Critics' Week. Only a couple of years ago it would have been mocked as agitprop; as it is, Erlingsson is doing the mocking himself. "Halldora Geirharosdottir, who plays Halla, has been at the forefront of #MeToo in Iceland," he said ruefully last week. "It irritates me how politically correct it makes this film look."

Kenyan lesbian drama Rafiki is directed by livewire rights advocate Wanuri Kahiu.

Kenyan lesbian drama Rafiki is directed by livewire rights advocate Wanuri Kahiu.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who for the past 20 years has been officially banned from making films but has managed to make four features during that time, has made a road movie called Three Faces with his friend Behnaz Jafari – a big soap opera star – in which they both play themselves. Behnaz receives what purports to be a suicide video from a young woman whose lifelong ambition to become an actress has been quashed by her parents, who insist she get married instead. There is just one glancing reference to Panahi's own real-life predicament; his focus is on the women.

Then there is Ash is Purest White by Chinese director Zhangke Jia, another cogent critic of his own society, who worked with his wife, Tao Zhao, to tell the story of a woman who moves up the ranks in one of the criminal fraternities that the director says have cropped up in areas of China left bereft by industry shutdowns. Birds of Passage, out of Colombia, is also about crime as a way of life, this time among warring drug clans; the central character is an elderly matriarch and shaman. Director Ciro Guerra, who had huge critical success with Embrace of the Serpent, worked this time with his wife and producer Cristina Gallego. They both felt she should be telling the woman's story.

Eva Husson's Girls of the Sun was screened following the Cannes protest.

Eva Husson's Girls of the Sun was screened following the Cannes protest.Credit: Maneki films/khatia ( juda ) Psuturi

The idea that women have a particular perspective and their own stories to tell is the crucial one right now. Last year, jury member Jessica Chastain said in her summing up that she found most of the films she had helped judge had a "disturbing" view of women. More films made by women, she went on, might include more of "the kinds of women I see in my day-to-day life. Ones who are proactive, have their own agencies, don't just react to the men around them, who have their own point of view."

Chastain, said Fremaux in a somewhat late awakening, "made me understand the importance of the 'female gaze' during the selection process". Cannes would be lending its voice to the struggle, he said in a later speech. "The world is not the same since the Weinstein case; it has woken up. And it's fortunate."

Jafar Panahi's Three Faces focuses on a young woman whose lifelong ambition to become an actress has been quashed by her parents.

Jafar Panahi's Three Faces focuses on a young woman whose lifelong ambition to become an actress has been quashed by her parents.Credit: Memento Films

Then this year's competition list came out, with its three films by women. Fremaux defended it by saying the selectors could only choose from what they were offered and artistic merit was their only yardstick. Quotas were out of the question. Blanchett appeared to back him up, saying that the women who were included "are not here because of their gender (but for) the quality of work".

There was thus considerable disappointment in French director Eva Husson's competition film Girls of the Sun, an ambitious take on the Kurdish struggle for independence that was screened on the night of the 82-women march. Respected director Emmanuelle Bercot plays a journalist embedded with a women's fighting unit made up of former ISIS captives. She too is battle-scarred – she has lost her partner and one eye to war – earning the grudging respect of unit commander Bahar (Golshifteh Farahani). Girls of the Sun conveyed a sense of sacrifice and heroism very different from most of its macho counterparts, but its narrative was muddled; there were even a couple of one-star reviews.

Jury president Cate Blanchett wore a used dress in sober #TimesUp black to the opening night of this year's Cannes Film Festival.

Jury president Cate Blanchett wore a used dress in sober #TimesUp black to the opening night of this year's Cannes Film Festival. Credit: Joel C Ryan

Other women's films, however, have drawn strong responses: Kenyan lesbian drama Rafiki by livewire rights advocate Wanuri Kahiu; Italian director Alice Rohrwacher's dreamy portrait of a holy innocent in Happy as Lazzaro; Los Silencios, a story of ghosts among the living in the Amazon marshes by Brazilian Beatriz Seigner and Leave No Trace, the story of an Oregon father and daughter living off the grid, directed by Debra Granik.

Granik's last feature film, Winter's Bone, launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence – who has, of course, been a leading voice in the demand for pay parity in films. Granik is wary of expectations that she will make women's films, however; Leave No Trace centres on a returned soldier played by Ben Foster.

Cate Blanchett heads the 82-strong protest at Cannes.

Cate Blanchett heads the 82-strong protest at Cannes.Credit: Arthur Mola

"You're always curious about those you know the least, right?" she says. "If I don't know what it's like to be you, I would love to have a chance to ask and observe and show some things I've never seen before." She also thinks this is a good time to be a woman making films in the United States. "The support is intense."

One unlikely epicentre for the discussion of women in filmmaking in Cannes has been the Saudi Arabian pavilion. Last year, the kingdom lifted a 35-year ban on cinema; this year, modernising Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced a $US64 billion investment in the entertainment sector within Saudi Arabia. Haifaa Al-Mansour, who famously directed her BAFTA-nominated film Wadjda from the back of a van to avoid public disapproval, is now advising the regime on cultural policy.

Director Debra Granik says it is a good time to be a woman making films in the US. ‘‘The support is intense.''

Director Debra Granik says it is a good time to be a woman making films in the US. ‘‘The support is intense.'' Credit: AP

Several young Saudi directors who have somehow made short films are in Cannes, eager to jump on the first wave. "Filmmaking is difficult for all of us, not just women," says Maram Taibah, who studied film at Boston University and whose second short film, Don't Go Too Far, is about a mentally challenged Saudi boy – based on her own brother – lost in New York. "People are camera-shy. It's hard to be in public with a camera – it attracts too many questions," she says. "And it's hard to find talent when there is no industry. Women are very tentative about going on camera." Although, she adds, she has never met a director who covered her face.

There are mumbles of resistance against this #womeninfilm focus in Cannes. Barely suppressed sighs around the interview table, for example, when a woman asks a question about women in film. Reviews that dismiss women's work just that little bit more swiftly and easily, as if nobody thought they could do it anyway. A room full of journalists – nearly all of them men – invited to the opening session of the Women in Motion series sponsored by Kering, the luxury goods empire. Carey Mulligan, who plays the lead in Paul Dano's Wildlife – the film opening Critics' Week – is the guest. One of the hand-picked journalists asks a question. "What would she think," he addresses the translator, "if I told her she was very beautiful?"

So there's that, in plain sight. The festival set up a hotline for women to report sexual aggressors during the 12-day event, so it will be interesting to hear at the end of tomorrow's proceedings whether that line was, in fact, hot. Just a couple of nights ago I was sitting in the front row of the Grand Lumiere – seats filled by the press – waiting for the real guests to arrive. The red-carpet action is beamed into the auditorium, so we could see the starlets walking and posing and tottering on their heels.

Every now and then, there is one who looks like she might burst out of her dress. What was she thinking? We gasp. The camera picks up every spilling breast and hasty wriggle of adjustment, of course; it looks under arms at slabs of breast the owners probably don't know are visible. Every time that happens, a wave of male chuckles reaches us from the balcony. They're not friendly chuckles. "The cheap seats," says one critic to me kindly, but we know that's not true. They're not cheap. They're free: everyone here is invited. That's the film industry up there; not everything has changed.

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