Afternoon, Cannes is over but the world of film and TV rumbles on. Here’s your weekly dose of Insider news ‘n’ goss from Max Goldbart.
Make us happy and sign up here. What’s In A Phrase? Complaints filed: We could fill these very pages (well, digital pages anyway) with news and analysis about the so-called ‘culture wars’ almost every week, but the past seven days has been ripe with incident.
When Karla Sofia Gascón (pictured) became the first transgender actress to win the Cannes Best Actress prize for Jacques Audiard’s gangster musical Emilia Perez last weekend she would have felt only joy, but that joy swiftly turned sour after French far-right politician Marion Maréchal-Le Pen responded to the win on X with: “So a man has won the Best Actress prize… progress for the left is the erasure of women and mothers.” Palms could be heard hitting faces across the land.
To me, the post felt as unsurprising as it was depressing, and Karla could no longer have her moment in the sun. In what has turned out to be a fast-moving story, French LGBTQ+ groups were quick to file a complaint against Le Pen, whose aunt is popular National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, as they threw their weight behind the Spanish actress, who plays a Mexican drug lord undergoing a sex change in the movie and had dedicated the prize to “all trans people who suffer every day.” There was some cruel irony embedded within that dedication.
Read more on deadline.com