The president of this year's Cannes Film Festival is Juliette Binoche, a splendid actress but also an incorrigible left-wing bobo militant of beat environmentalism. She showed up with a strange veil on her head at Cannes. Perhaps a glamorous hijab? A winking half-veil? A chic white chador? In any case, she looked like a sort of Islamically correct Madonna.
It's easy to be a leftist when you're swimming in millions and risk nothing on the Rive Gauche (Left Bank of the Seine, Paris,ed.). But courage is taking off your veil in Kabul (where the Taliban whip women in public) and Tehran (where the Mullahs whip women in prison), not putting one on in front of an assembly of artists and billionaires who gorge themselves on caviar while talking about “sustainability”.
Two years ago, an actress first showed up veiled at Cannes and the feminists applauded in the name of “inclusion” and the usual banal political correctness. Certainly no one expected to hear words spoken from the stage by Zahra Amir Ebrahimi, the Iranian actress who won the award for best actress at Cannes for her role in the film Holy Spider by director Ali Abbasi. Ebrahimi said that “women are oppressed in Afghanistan, Iran, Mali and…. in the Parisian suburbs”.
Parisian suburbs?
Yes, you should ask the Algerian poet and writer Kamel Bencheikh, who reports what happened to her daughter in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. “Around 11 p.m., my daughter Élise was waiting for the bus line 60 with a friend, at the Botzaris stop near the Buttes-Chaumont park. When it arrived, the driver stopped, looked at them and drove off without opening the doors.” The driver told Bencheikh’s daughter, who was wearing a miniskirt: “Think about dressing properly.”
I have no idea what films are competing at Cannes and I don’t want to know (for me, Cannes is the seafront and where Alexis de Tocqueville died), but I have a few suggestions: “The Awakening of Pronouns”, “Shattering the White Patriarchy,” “The Inclusive Odyssey,” “Salam,” “Decolonize Zionism” and “Allah-La-Land”.
As president of the jury, Binoche delivered a solemn message. She spoke of global conflicts, human suffering and the responsibility of artists. The actress then got lost in her own words. “Humidity... humility and the humidity of hummus, which is humility,” she told a somewhat perplexed audience. The actress paid tribute to Palestinian Arab photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, killed in Gaza last month.
“Fatima should have been with us tonight,” she mourned. The little murdered Bibas brothers were also not in Cannes, but Juliette couldn’t find any words for them. Not very fashionable.
And while Saint Juliette was educating us about the humidity of hummus, another pregnant Israeli woman was killed by terrorists who are going strong on the treadmill.
The artists present at Cannes have launched a manifesto in Libération against the “genocide underway in Gaza”. It is legitimate to be concerned about Gaza, but in this text the Hamas narrative is adopted, which is a bit more problematic.
For the tapis rouge (red carpet, ed.), resistance is a great moment. There have never been so many bad guys around, even if for these privileged people, Putin, Xi, Hamas and the rest can never be as bad as Israel and Trump (and the West in general).
Former hostage Dafna Elaykim has just shared publicly for the first time the abuse she suffered while imprisoned by Hamas. Dafna revealed that one of her captors molested her. “One of the terrorists was constantly touching me. He said they were going to free everyone except me because he wanted to marry me. He insisted on taking me to the shower.”
But which feminist cares? MeToo! “The Revolution Begins on the Croisette” could be a great title for a film.
The veil may be in fashion, but Binoche’s Western-style neckline would not be welcome in Gaza, Tehran and Kabul. Once she improves that, the beautiful Juliette has no choice but to announce her conversion to Islam.
