The French former culture minister has denounced her country’s film actors, directors and producers as a club of entitled, overpaid complainers who churn out flops.
In an extraordinary attack, Roselyne Bachelot, who was replaced last May after two years in President Macron’s cabinet, has settled her score with an arts establishment with which she had clashed. The highly subsidised film industry is her chief target in her memoirs, 682 Days — The Hypocrites’ Ball.
To ensure France’s “cultural exception”, the film industry is “stuffed with money” allowing it turn out more films than anywhere else in Europe, but its members complain endlessly about their conditions, she writes.
“The famous ‘cultural exception’ allows very many French films ‘not to find their public’, as they say politely, or more explicitly, to be flops,” she writes. “This system also guarantees lead actors to earn fabulous fees, three or four times higher than actors in the American independent cinema.”
The system, which includes direct subsidies, tax breaks and advances on box office earnings, pours hundreds of millions of euros a year into production, “creating an assisted economy that hardly cares about the tastes of spectators and is even contemptuous of popular, profitable films,” she added.
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Similar sentiments have come from critics, including producers such as Luc Besson, in recent years but the industry has never come under such fire from a former or serving culture minister, a post with responsibility for promoting French cinema. The feeble state of the industry was emphasised last week when figures showed that American films dominated the French box office last year. There was no homegrown film in the top ten, for the first time since 1989.
In her two years in office, Bachelot, now 76, a blunt-speaking conservative who has served in the cabinets of three presidents since 2002, bore the brunt of industry anger over cinema closures in the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. She recalls the ceremony for the César film awards in March 2021, when winners took swipes at her in their acceptance speeches and Corinne Masiero, an actress, stripped naked, revealing “No Culture, no future” daubed on her body.
“One would like it if the directors and the actors could be a little nicer,” Bachelot said in Le Parisien newspaper today.
Macron replaced Bachelot with Rima Abdul Malak, 43, a Lebanese-born culture administrator, in a reshuffle after his re-election in April.
