“I can’t make the movie if I don’t sleep with you. The French director made the news at the end of February, after receiving the Silver Bear for best director at the 73rd Berlinale for his film The Big Cart. Philippe Garrel finds himself again in full light but, this time, for accusations of five actresses and several anonymous.
The latter denounce, in Mediapart columns, sexual proposals during dates for roles and non-consensual kisses. The news site collected in its investigation the testimonies of the actresses Anna Mouglalis, Clotilde Hesme, Marie Vialle and Laurence Cordier as well as those of former students of the director at the Conservatory.
A role against sexual favors
The actress Marie Vialle thus explains that during her classes at the Conservatoire, Philippe Garrel would have offered her to “write a film for her”. The young woman, then in her twenties, went to several professional meetings with the director. During their last meeting, the man would have tried to kiss her and pronounced this sentence: “I can’t make the film if I don’t sleep with you”.
“I remember explaining to him that, like many New Wave directors, I liked to shoot with the woman I was in love with and film her. I may have tried to kiss her, I don’t remember, but she most certainly rejected me since it was precisely at that lunch that I understood that she was not at all attracted to me. », justifies the director.
No complaint and a “realization”
The actress Anna Mouglalis explains that during an appointment on a feature film which was to deal with female desire, the director would have taken advantage of his visit to the bathroom to lie down on his bed. A version that Philippe Garrel denies, explaining that he had “unease” in the kitchen of the actress who pushed him to lie down “twenty minutes before returning” home. The monument of the New Wave claims that it has “never happened to him to kiss a woman against her will”.
However, of the five actresses who testify publicly in Mediapart, four relate attempts at non-consensual kisses. No complaint has been lodged against the director, who evokes an “awakening of awareness” in the face of the testimonies. “I realize the difference between what I imagined then and what I made them live. I had already become aware of the culture that shaped me, and that opened up a questioning in me,” he says.