Why what Justine Triet said in Cannes is legitimate

Everyone can have their own opinion about those expressed by Justine Triet at the time of receiving the Palme d’or pour Anatomy of a fallSaturday May 27, during the closing ceremony of the 76^e Cannes film festival. But no one should dispute her right to say what she said. Because she said it from her place as a filmmaker, which is obviously legitimate on the stage of a major film festival.

This speech, which is now being debated, had three elements. And all three relate to what she was on stage for at the time, in front of the microphones and the cameras. With conciseness, the director indeed tackled two themes, apparently distinct. On the one hand, she talked about the movement against pension reform. But contrary to what has been much repeated, she said nothing about the reform as such.

The French filmmaker condemned the fact that a “historic, extremely powerful, unanimous protest against pension reform” a “been denied, shockingly suppressed”. There is no doubt that she is against this reform – as a large majority of French people– but his subject here is the attempt to make this rejection invisible, the negation, the “moving on to something else” wanted and orchestrated by the President of the Republic.

Justine Triet’s speech is the address of a director to a director called Emmanuel Macron. It is legitimate for people whose job it is to organize elements of narrative and representation, especially someone who has just been rewarded for doing this, to comment on how another person does the same thing, and to in a way she considers inappropriate. The meaning of this passage is simply: the Hundred Days is a bad film, which does not work.

Then, Justine Triet criticized what is happening in the organization of cinema in France. Contrary to what Rima Abdul-Malak, Minister of Culture, pretended to have heardshe did not attack the system of public support, but on the contrary endangered it through ongoing reforms and projects.

And contrary to what most of the hostile reactions to her speech claim, she did not behave in “spoiled child” or in “ungrateful”but on the contrary proclaimed its recognition for all the devices that we summarize, more or less appropriately by the formula of cultural exception, “without which I will not be here in front of you”.

And who can say that a person who works in a sector, the cinema in this case, is not legitimate to express himself on the organization of this sector and its evolutions?

And finally, Justine Triet linked the two subjects, the attempt of the power to sweep under the carpet the oppositions to the reform of the pensions and the modifications in progress of the public system accompanying the cinema.

That is to say that she has, exactly as in her film, operated a composition, which shows how apparently disjoint processes work together, or relating to different issues. Or, precisely, what the staging does, what has to do and what it had just received the Palme d’or for.

Jean-Michel Frodon’s film reviews are to be found in the show “Cultural Affinities” by Tewfik Hakem, Sundays from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. on France Culture.