Greta Gerwig gets four-minute serenade as #MeToo roils Cannes

Gerwig is only the second female director, after Jane Campion, to head the jury, and that très fromage-y serenade — which was followed by a teary Juliette Binoche presenting a teary Meryl Streep an honorary Palme d’Or — was a stark contrast to the earlier part of her day, when politics and France’s #MeToo reckoning dominated the traditional jury news conference.

This came despite festival artistic director Thierry Frémaux’s stated wish that the “polemics” be confined to what’s on the screen this year. He also acknowledged that, at a time when protests about Gaza also threaten to breach the festival’s bubble, and festival workers are threatening to strike over wages, it’s an impossible wish. “I said we wanted a festival without polemics,” he said in a Monday news conference, “but that doesn’t mean there would be.”

The festival’s dive into politics started almost immediately with the premiere of Quentin Dupieux’s “The Second Act,” a comedy starring Léa Seydoux and Louis Garrel about a group of actors facing “cancellation” while shooting the first film written and directed completely by artificial intelligence, at what is clearly the end of cinema. (At a talk on Wednesday, Streep said she’d loved it and had been up till 3 a.m. discussing all the existential dilemmas it had raised.)

Outside the Palais, soldiers armed with machine guns, from France’s Operation Sentinelle, designed to stop terrorist attacks, marched in front of the Prada and Hermès stores along the Croisette. And that strike of festival workers did actually happen, sort of, when a small group briefly scaled the roof of the Palais during the opening ceremony and unfurled a spray-painted banner with their motto, “Sous les écrans la dèche” (“Under the screen, the waste”).

The polemics will continue. A 17-minute film called “Moi Aussi,” about abuse in the country’s film industry and directed by French actor Judith Godrèche, was a last-minute addition to the festival and is debuting Wednesday as one of the opening films of the Un Certain Regard selection. Godrèche is one of the leading voices in France’s #MeToo movement and has accused two acclaimed directors, Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon, of rape and sexual and physical violence that dates to when she was an adolescent. Both directors have denied the allegations.

In the fall, one of France’s biggest stars, Gérard Depardieu, will stand trial for allegedly sexually assaulting two women on a film set, among another separate charge of rape and an investigation into allegations of abuse. (He denies all charges.) There are also rumors that a secret list of 10 prominent men in the French film industry who’ve allegedly been abusive to women, including big-time directors and actors, some of whom may have films here, could be released during the festival. That would cause some extreme scrambling around whether to screen those works at all. French media has reported that festival organizers have set up a crisis management team.

And later this week, “The Apprentice” will debut, about Donald Trump’s rise to power as a real estate mogul and his “Faustian deal” with Roy Cohn, according to its festival listing. In some truly genius casting, Sebastian Stan plays Trump and Jeremy Strong is Cohn.

Before the ceremony, Gerwig, alongside fellow jury members, including Lily Gladstone, Eva Green and French actor Omar Sy (“Lupin”), fielded a barrage of questions.

“I think people in the community of movies telling us stories and trying to change things for the better is only good,” Gerwig said, praising France for “moving everything in the correct direction” and highlighting the changes that happened in the American film industry since its #MeToo reckoning seven years earlier, particularly the rise of intimacy coordinators on film sets.

“That was not something when I was starting out that happened at all and now it’s being built into films,” she said. “And I think the exact same way as I think of a stunt coordinator [or] a fight coordinator: It is an art, and it’s part of building a safe environment, just as you would if you were going to have two people fight with swords. You don’t just see what happens. That would be terrifying!”

Asked by The Washington Post about whether she could be objective watching a movie about Trump, as a woman living in America at a time when female reproductive rights have been deeply eroded, Gerwig said her goal was to come into each film with “an open heart and an open mind and to be willing to be surprised.” Often, she said, we hear that a movie is about something on the surface, but it turns out to be something else.

Gladstone added, “I don’t think objectivism is necessary in such a case, but taking it for the art form that it will be, because, I mean, unfortunately [Trump films] could be a genre in and of itself.”

Festivalgoers were also still talking about the news that filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof had fled Iran and was in hiding in Europe after receiving an eight-year prison sentence, with flogging, for security offenses. His film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” will compete for the Palme d’Or and debuts at the end of the festival.