Let’s All Take a Minute to Appreciate Jessica Chastain Calling Out Hollywood at the Cannes Film Festival
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Over the weekend, Sofia Coppola won the best director award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival for her film The Beguiled and became the first woman in 56 years to be bestowed with the honor. (The last female filmmaker to win the award was Russian director Yuliya Solntseva in 1961.) Coppola’s movie, a revamp of a 1971 film about a wounded Union soldier who takes refuge at an all-girls school in the Confederate South, received a five-minute standing ovation after it premiered at the festival last week. In a statement, Coppola, who explained she remade the movie to highlight the women’s point of view, took a moment to thank Focus Features and Universal for “their support of women-driven films.”
And yet, the lack of female-led movies was one of the most discussed topics at the starry cinema fest this year. During a party celebrating Cannes’s 70th anniversary, Oscar-nominated actress Isabelle Huppert dropped the mic after she said: “Seventy years, 76 Palme d’Ors, but only one has gone to a woman. No comment.” Meanwhile, Jane Campion, the only female director to ever win the Palme d’Or, for The Piano in 1993, expressed her frustration with the clear gender imbalance at the awards ceremony during an interview last week. “[It’s been] too long! Twenty-four years!” she said about her win. “And before that, there was no one. It’s insane.”
Jessica Chastain, a juror at this year’s festival, also addressed female representation on film. The actress, who has frequently commented on the Hollywood pay gap and lamented the lack of female-helmed movies in a 2015 Hollywood Reporter essay, explained that as a woman, the slate of movies screened left a lot to be desired. “This is the first time I’ve watched 20 films in 10 days, and I love movies,” she said. “And the one thing I really took away from this experience is how the world views women from the female characters that I saw represented. It was quite disturbing to me, to be honest.”
As jury president Pedro Almodóvar nodded his agreement, Chastain continued: “I do hope that when we include more female storytellers, we will have more of the women that I recognize in my day-to-day life. Ones that are proactive; have their own agencies; don’t just react to the men around them.” With Coppola’s win on Sunday, it seems like Cannes is at least headed in the right direction.
This story originally appeared on Vogue.
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