Ex-French Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot Takes Aim At “Cinema World… Stuffed With Public Money” In Pandemic Memoir

deadline.com:

Veteran French politician Roselyne Bachelot has taken an extraordinary potshot at the French film industry and the state funding system that keeps it afloat in a candid memoir recounting her difficult term as France’s culture minister during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Entitled 682 Jours – Le Bal Des Hypocrites (682 Days – The Hypocrites’ Ball) the book is stirring controversy in France following its publication there on Thursday for Bachelot’s outspoken criticism of the behaviour of everyone from technocrats to small-town councillors to “stars on big salaries” during the health crisis.

In a section on the film industry, Bachelot questioned the efficacy of France’s state funding mechanisms for cinema, suggesting the driving principle of French cultural exception resulted in films that were of no interest to the general public. “The famous ‘Cultural Exception’ in fact allows very many French films ‘not to find their public’, to put it politely, or more explicitly, to be flops,” she wrote. “This system also guarantees lead actors to secure extraordinary fees, three or four times superior to actors in American independent cinema.” “Public subsidies, advance on receipts, tax breaks, intermittence (the support scheme for freelance entertainment workers) have created an assisted economy that hardly cares about the tastes of spectators and is even contemptuous of popular, profitable films,” she continued.

She recalled how giving Dany Boon a César Award for the box office success of his films had been greeted with derision in some quarters. “Giving a César to Dany Boon and his more than 20 million entries… what a ridiculous idea!” she parodied.