While Benoît Jacquot has been the subject of a complaint for rape by Judith Godrèche since January 7, Télérama invited him to react to the comments he made in a documentary broadcast in 2011. Directed by Gérard Miller - currently accused of rape and of sexual assaults by 41 women - and entitled The Ruses of Desire, Jacquot expressed his conviction that a director
"cannot film an actress if he is not in love with her"
.
“Judith defied my desire as a very young woman can do, I believe,”
he added before addressing, with a smile, the transgressive potentialities that cinema offers.
“It is necessarily a transgression if only with regard to the law as it is said
,” recognizes the director who had a relationship with Judith Godrèche, 25 years his junior, in the 80s
. We don't have the right in principle, I think... But she didn't give a damn about that, and even that excited her a lot, I would say."
And Benoît Jacquot continues
: “In any case, making cinema is a kind of cover, in the sense that we have cover for this or that illicit traffic.
It’s a sort of cover for morals of this type: “Ah yes but he’s a filmmaker, he’s an artist, he’s creating an actress, creating, that’s their thing, well… ”.”
A permissiveness that, according to him, other directors
“in the cinematographic field
” envied him.
These comments repulsed Judith Godrèche, reports an article in Le Monde.
This documentary is an electric shock.
An awareness which reached its conclusion this week, when the 51-year-old actress filed a complaint for rape against Benoît Jacquet and Jacques Doillon, who abused her on set.
Read alsoBenoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon struck by the “New Wave” #MeToo
Benoît Jacquot recognizes in the columns of Télérama that the images broadcast by the documentary are unacceptable:
“It’s a shame!
Provocative bass.
I get disgusted when I hear myself and I understand Judith's reaction.
»
But this statement is not supported by confessions: the director maintains that his relationship with Judith Godrèche, when she was 14 and he was 40, was
“a consensual love story”
.
He denies
“any physical and psychological violence”,
any control, and maintains that the young girl was 15 years old when they first had sexual relations, an important detail since it is the age of sexual majority.
Benoît Jacquot believes he is the victim of a
“major communications operation”
carried out by the actress and director to
“promote her series”, Icon of French Cinema,
available on
Arte.
Also read: Judith Godrèche, the “icon of French cinema” who no longer wanted to be “the archetype of the nice girl”
“This determination that Judith shows today in shooting me,”
continues Jacquot, “
she then used to get me out of the sentimental and cinematographic impasse in which I found myself.
She came into my life in an incredible way, brought me out of my depression by asking me to make a film that would make her known.
I owe her a lot and it saddens me that she doesn't recognize that she owes me a lot too.
»
Judithe Godrèche nevertheless recalls, in a letter published in Le Monde, a truth that Jacquot would tend to forget:
“This thing – consent – I never gave it.
No.
Never ever.
So, it's time.
The despair of my past weakness, the despair of my stolen childhood, has found its voice.”