Acclaimed French director is accused of sexual assault

Abdellatif Kechiche, an acclaimed French director whose film “Blue Is the Warmest Color” won the top prize at Cannes in 2013, is under investigation for sexual assault, officials in Paris said Wednesday.

The complaint was filed Oct 6 and the Paris prosecutor’s office opened a preliminary investigation soon afterward. The woman who filed the complaint has not been named.

A report on BFM-TV, a French television network, said that a 29-year-old actress had made the complaint. The woman said that she knew Kechiche and had been at a dinner party with him and a friend of his in the 20th Arrondissement of Paris in late June. She told the network that she had had several alcoholic drinks and did not remember exactly what happened, but that she awoke to find she was lying on a couch with her pants unzipped as he fondled her.

Kechiche’s lawyer, Jeremie Assous, told the network that Kechiche categorically denied the accusations. Efforts by The New York Times to reach Assous on Wednesday evening were unsuccessful.

Kechiche, 57, is a Franco-Tunisian director who began his film career as an actor, and also has written screenplays. In addition to Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, he has won César awards, a national French film prize, for directing, as well as other awards.

Kechiche is the second French film director to be accused of sexual assault in recent months. The other was Luc Besson, who was accused of rape. The renowned actor Gerard Depardieu also is facing accusations of rape. In all the cases, the accusations involved younger actresses and considerably older and more powerful men in the film industry. None of the three have been charged. Besson and Depardieu denied the accusations.

While “Blue Is the Warmest Colour” was a critical hit, it also led to complaints about Kechiche’s directing habits. The film follows a love affair between two young women, one of whom is open about her lesbian sexuality and the other who is younger and less sure of herself.

The lead actresses, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, who shared the Palme D’Or with Kechiche, said in interviews that it had been “torture” to work with him because, among other things, he demanded that they do repeated takes of a nude scene in which they have sex, which they considered humiliating and unnecessary. In one case, he required at least one of them to spend much of one day naked. They also complained about being forced to redo another scene that was physically painful and resulted in one of the actresses being banged by a door.

In an interview with Telerama in 2013, Kechiche said that Seydoux “did not take into consideration the disastrous effect of her comments,” which he felt undermined the film and sullied his craft.

At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where Seydoux was a member of a largely female jury, she returned to the subject in an interview and noted that it was now a different era, when women’s complaints were being taken more seriously.

“It has been five years since Adèle and I were mistreated,” she said. “Some actresses criticised me and counselled me to shut up if we wanted to continue to work.”

Kechiche at the time brushed off her complaints, she said in the interview. He told her she was a “well-off young woman, a spoiled little girl,” when she protested about her treatment on the set, Seydoux said.

In retrospect, she said: “This is intolerable. Nothing justifies torturing people, and it did not make the film better. I think that today our testimony, mine and Adèle’s, would be received with more goodwill. Certainly, I hope so.”

© 2018 New York Times News Service