Icon of the world-famous French cinema, but also “free woman” who “says what she wants”, Catherine Deneuve, criticized after having pleaded for the “freedom to annoy” the women, never hesitated to go against -current, without fear of shocking.
For two days, it is the target of sharp attacks on social networks, in France and abroad, for having co-signed with a hundred personalities a forum in Le Monde defending a “freedom to annoy” women, “essential to sexual freedom “and worried about a return of” puritanism “after the Weinstein affair.
“Just one day after the Golden Globes, where Hollywood showed support for the #MeToo movement, a famous actress from across the Atlantic signs a platform to denounce this movement and its French counterpart, balancetonporc,” writes New York Times .
Actress Asia Argento, one of the first to denounce producer Harvey Weinstein, was more scathing on Twitter: “Catherine Deneuve and other French women tell the world how their internalized misogyny lobotomized them to the point of no return”.
Catherine Deneuve and other French women tell the world how their interiorized misogyny has lobotomized them to the point of no return https://t.co/AuH0aZdnCq
— Asia Argento (@AsiaArgento) January 9, 2018
In the British daily The Guardian , who believes that the actress is “best known for playing the role of a prostitute in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour , in 1967,” the Australian writer Van Badham “explains” to “Catherine Deneuve why #MeToo is nothing like a witch hunt.
Polanski support
Before this platform, she had already attracted the wrath of feminists by supporting the director Roman Polanski. She had said that she had always found “excessive” the term “rape” in connection with the 1977 charge of the person with whom she shot Repulsion .
The alleged victim of the director, Samantha Geimer, who has since pardoned his attacker, has also supported the actress on Twitter. “I totally agree with Catherine Deneuve. Women need equality, respect and sexual freedom. What we get by ourselves (…). Not by asking others to protect us.
I agree whole entirely with Ms. Deneuve. Women need equality, respect and sexual freedom, we get that by standing up for ourselves and each other. Not by asking others to protect us and define what is “allowed” for ladies. https://t.co/7EszEpE6rC
— Samantha Geimer (@sjgeimer) January 9, 2018
Just like these recent releases, Catherine Deneuve is above all “a free woman who does not let herself walk on her feet,” observes Eric Neuhoff, cinema specialist at Le Figaro . “She says what she thinks, what she wants.”
“The word freedom sticks to his skin. She has always been free to choose her life, career and fighting, whether by signing the manifesto of 343 (in favor of abortion in 1971 in France) or to support Polanski, “adds the journalist Alexandre Fache , author of Catherine Deneuve: a biography .
However, the star has recently told the magazine Technikart have never belonged to feminist movements.
“A whole character”
While its recent stances have disconcerted public opinion, it also committed in 2001 to the abolition of the death penalty in the United States. In 2004, she chaired an Amnesty Gala to support a campaign against violence against women. And in 2007, she co-signed a petition to support socialist candidate Ségolène Royal, a target of sexist attacks during the presidential campaign.
Medically, Catherine Deneuve also practices the art of the counterpoise, able to appear in “cougar” alongside a young man naked in one of a magazine gay, stubborn , or to lend with humor for television reading hilarious phrases about fashion, a world she loves.
In recent years, the 74-year-old actress has given the impression of breaking her image as a distant star or even a great bourgeois cold built throughout his career.
If Eric Neuhoff suggests that “the age, which authorizes everything, is perhaps for something”, Alexandre Fache affirms on the contrary that it never stopped having a free speech. “She has always been pretty rare in the media because she does not like to indulge. But when she does it, it is frankly.
“It is an entire character, remarkably organized under frivolous appearances. She has very advanced ideas, I would say even anarchists in all fields, career, family, love … “, said her father Maurice Dorléac, in remarks to the magazine Cinémonde in 1964 reported by the magazine Schnock .