The interview is titled “The Man Who Loved Actresses.” In a long interview published on December 5, 2006 in The Unrockuptibles, filmmaker Benoît Jacquot talks about the driving force behind his creation. In this case, “young girls, most often his companions”, writes the monthly. The director returns to his relationship with Judith Godrèche, heroine of The Disenchanted. “I told myself that if I put myself in this position, to desire the desire of a very young girl who wants to be an actress, I was going to make her inhabit the film throughout, without reservation, without exception,” says Jacquot, who then outlines a Faustian explanation: “With all the same a pact: if I give her the film, she, in return, gives herself completely. Which is to be understood in all the senses we want “.
The reaction of Inrocks The filmmaker’s words can be summed up in one word: indifference. The details of the past relationship between Godrèche and him are however not hidden from the magazine. The reader knows that The Disenchantedreleased in 1990, is the second film she made with him after Beggars, made four years earlier. This filming led to an affair. At that time, Godrèche was 14 years old. He is 39. For Jacquot, a story of “savior” and “saved”, as he told it over and over again. One being a teenager and the other soon to be in her forties.
Asked about his work with his “muses”, the director never hid his affairs with young girls, often minors. When these confidences were made, the general public was not yet aware of the accusations of rape and violence to which Judith Godrèche would later testify. But the relationship raises questions, if only in the eyes of the law. She was not yet of sexual majority when their relationship began, set at 15 years since 1945. Long before filing a complaint, the actress also noted this during an interview in Psychologies, on May 1, 2007. Asked about “this father” whom she “left very young to live with the director Benoît Jacquot”, Godrèche replied, without being relaunched by the magazine: “For a long time, it was secret, I “I was 15, he was 40, he could be prosecuted.”
“It excited him a lot more”
Benoît Jacquot is also aware of this. In 2011, questioned during Gérard Miller’s documentary, The tricks of desire: the forbidden, on the “transgression” that his relationship with the young girl represented, he replies: “In terms of the law… We do not have the right in principle […] But she didn’t give a damn and even that, on the contrary, excited her a lot more.” The filmmaker draws a parallel between his filming and his “illicit trafficking of minors” and evokes his “Bluebeard” side. .
Jacquot has already boasted of having “exchanged” his young muses with other directors. Like Virginie Ledoyen, whom he discovered in a film by Olivier Assayas, Cold waterin 1994. “It’s amusing these exchanges of fresh flesh that there can be between filmmaker friends”, he comments, as noted The worldin the bonuses of a double DVD published by Cinema notebooks. Jacquot, 47 years old, will live a story with Ledoyen, 17 years old at the time of their meeting. A few years later, he will have one another with Isild Le Besco, during a collaboration started when he was 16, when he was 52. In the press, the director is perpetually confused with the characters in his films – Release designates him in 2019 as The last of the Casanovas. Relationships of control are never mentioned as we can do today.
White wedding
The complacency towards him speaks of an era. Until recently, relationships between young people, even those under 15, and much older men in the world of culture were received without much excitement. The testimony of Judith Godrèche in The world and his complaint for “violent rape of a minor under the age of 15” – the Paris prosecutor’s office has opened a preliminary investigation – shed harsh light on the practices and power relations of French cinema. In turn, they also question the way the press views them.
Several generations of young girls are associated with the figure of the “Lolita”, with a very first-level reading of Nabokov’s work. The fantasy is expressed in particular in the film White Wedding, released in 1989, depicting the tumultuous affair between a teacher played by Bruno Cremer, 60, and his 17-year-old student, played by Vanessa Paradis. Much later, in 2005, during the trial for sexual harassment of its director, Jean-Claude Brisseau on another shoot, Release will report that, according to the latter’s mother, he had asked the actress, who was still a minor, to masturbate in front of him and his partner. The young woman had complained of moral harassment, without this episode affecting many people. Comment from Paris Match, at the time, launched into a vehement defense of the director: “Brisseau is not necessarily more perverse than anyone else, except that he got caught. Like the majority of men, he only thinks about that. But he found the right combination to satisfy his libido with his rather saucy actresses.” This article, published in September 2006 and entitled “Art? Especially pork!” however found one fault in Brisseau: that of having made a bad film. “We are ready to forgive genius everything and grant many excuses to talent,” he concluded. “It’s difficult to find any in Brisseau when we look at his new production.”
Girls sexualized at 12 years old
At the time, actresses, especially young girls, were compared to temptresses, masters of their sexuality from the start of adolescence. In 2001, a portrait of Maïwenn Le Besco (sister of Isild) in the monthly VSD recounts her nightclub outings: “At 12, the kid is ten years older. She is 1.75 meters tall, her chest is plump, her lips luscious.” Maïwenn tells how she was “picked up” by adults. Three years after these outings, she met in the toilets of Fouquet’s the director Luc Besson, 17 years her senior, whom she married shortly after. “At this ceremony (of the Césars), few people noticed, alongside Besson, the presence of a young girl. A very young girl. Maïwenn Le Bescot, 16 years old,” relates Paris Match on January 4, 1999 in a portrait dedicated to the director. Continuation of the article: “Their romance began in discretion and continued in fury. From Maïwenn’s father, learning of his daughter’s affair with a director much older than her. Luc and Maïwenn pass beyond paternal ire and soon have a daughter.
Maïwenn will never deny her relationship with Luc Besson. Sophie Marceau, also in a relationship with a man much older than her, from her adolescence, neither. In a testimony given to the weekly Live Cinema Studio in April 2001, the star recounted her meeting with her future husband, director Andrzej Zulawski, in Cannes in 1981. “I don’t remember the first time I met Andrzej, but he, on the other hand, remembers it,” says the star. “Presented” by the director of The party Claude Pinoteau, the actress and the filmmaker share a table at the Majestic hotel. “He was watching me, and he admitted to me that he had had a flash. I was only a 14-year-old girl, but at that moment, he understood that one day, he something would happen between us, something of a lifetime…”, Sophie Marceau is moved. The director was then 41 years old. They formalized their relationship three years later. In 2001, the star’s testimony was not accompanied by any questions or comments from Live Cinema Studio.
A “great love story”
The relationships between filmmakers and young girls certainly have a slight scent of sulfur, but are above all perceived as impossible love stories. The artist lives in the romantic, he defies the forbidden by mocking conventions. There is talk of “muse” and “pygmalion”. This thought is summarized by one of the leaders of French cinema, Daniel Toscan du Plantier, in a column published by Release.
On February 18, 2000, the former general director of Gaumont, then president of the Academy of Cinema Arts and Techniques, wrote: “Most of the first century of the history (of cinema) was built on these meetings fortuitous events which made Sternberg, Bergman, Rossellini, Truffaut and the others masters nourished by the grace of inspired young women whom they used and abused for their own benefit. Today, the Téchiné, Jacquot, Wargnier, Assayas and others happily perpetuate this very French tradition. “Abuses”, therefore, which the producer welcomes, and which, in his own words, participate in a system. “It would be fair to add a few other possessive libidos, those of the producers and all those who have made the industry of desire the industry of their own desires to note that the 7th art has had as its main activity the transformation of sexuality as a war machine to conquer the masses,” he also says.
At the trial of Jean-Jacques Brisseau, ultimately convicted of sexual harassment, the lawyer for the two actresses, Claire Doubli, estimated that “the alibi of aesthetic research” had limits “which have largely been crossed”. An observation made in 2005. Amid general indifference at the time.
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