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TODAY IN FRANCE

Cannes opens with Johnny Depp’s French comeback drama

The Cannes Film Festival was set for a stormy opening on Tuesday, with Johnny Depp making his comeback in the opening film, showing off his French skills as King Louis XV.

Published: 16 May 2023 08:59 CEST
Cannes opens with Johnny Depp's French comeback drama
US actor Johnny Depp (Photo by LOIC VENANCE / AFP)

The 59-year-old’s career nosedived in Hollywood, despite his victory in a defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard last year that featured bitter domestic violence allegations.

But Depp has been gradually returning to work and will hit the red carpet for the opening night in Cannes with French period drama Jeanne du Barry about the 18th-century monarch who fell in love with a prostitute.

Festival director Thierry Fremaux told reporters he was “not interested” in Depp’s trial, adding: “I am interested in Depp the actor.”

Michael Douglas will also attend the opening ceremony to receive an honorary Palme d’Or.

The French Riviera festival, which runs until May 27, includes a slew of hot-ticket premieres, including Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny on Wednesday, the fifth and final outing for Harrison Ford as the whip-cracking archaeologist.

Saturday will see Martin Scorsese present his latest epic, Killers of the Flower Moon, alongside stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.

That day also sees Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore in indie favourite Todd Haynes’s May December.

It is among 21 films competing for the top prize Palme d’Or, including films by a record seven women directors.

Fremaux said increasing women’s representation at the festival was a “fundamental question” but “I refuse congratulations, it is an evolution. We don’t look at the gender, we select movies.”

Several Palme laureates are back in competition, including Britain’s two-time winner Ken Loach, Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda and Germany’s Wim Wenders.

The jury is led by last year’s winner, Sweden’s Ruben Ostlund (Triangle of Sadness), and also includes Hollywood stars Brie Larson and Paul Dano.

Around a thousand police and security guards are in place for the festival, amid fears of protests linked to President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular pension reforms, with the CGT union even threatening to cut power.

Jeanne du Barry has reportedly yet to secure US distribution. His dialogue in the film is kept to short phrases that help disguise his American accent.

Maiwenn, the French star who directs and plays the lead role, admitted she was worried about the impact of his legal woes.

“The film was shot last summer and he was coming out of his second trial,” Maiwenn, who goes by a single name, told AFP last week.

“I had a lot of worries. I was wondering: “what will his image become?”,” she said.

But she faces her own controversies. In March, a well-known French journalist, Edwy Plenel of Mediapart, lodged a criminal complaint against Maiwenn, accusing her of approaching him in a
restaurant, grabbing him by the hair and spitting in his face.

She refused to discuss the “ongoing case” with AFP, but admitted the assault in an interview on French TV, without going into details.

Depp was axed from Harry Potter spin-off “Fantastic Beasts” following Heard’s abuse allegations, but he is a long way from being “cancelled”.

He has secured a record $20 million deal to remain the face of Dior fragrance, according to Variety last week. He is also set to direct Al Pacino in a biopic of artist Amedeo Modigliani later this year.

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CULTURE

Can Costner lead the revenge of France’s much-mocked Kevins?

In 1990s France, amidst the Pierres and the Jean-Claudes, a Hollywood hero with all-American good looks inspired a new name craze.

Published: 19 May 2024 16:52 CEST
Can Costner lead the revenge of France's much-mocked Kevins?

The era of the Kevin — or Kev-een as the French pronounce it — had arrived, ushered in by the passions unleashed by a moustachioed Kevin Costner in his epic directorial debut, “Dances with Wolves”.

Suddenly, little Kevins were to be found the length and breadth of France.

But it wasn’t all plain sailing for these young ambassadors of Americana.

As Kevin Costner, now aged 69, prepares for his much-anticipated comeback at the Cannes Film Festival, AFP looks at how his French namesakes went from hero to zero and back again:

Je m’appelle Kevin

Celtic in origin, hailing from the Irish name “Caoimhin” after a hermit monk who lived in a stone cell in a glacial valley, the Kevin craze was sparked by not one but two huge Hollywood films.

In 1990 two million French people flocked to see the antics of a young boy called Kevin battling to defend his family home from burglars in “Home Alone”.

A year later, “Dances with Wolves”, which scooped seven Oscars, topped the French box office, pulling in a whopping seven million viewers.

The impact on birth certificates was immediate — that year Kevin was the most popular boy’s name in France, chosen for just over 14,000 newborns, according to data compiled by AFP.

The wave continued with over 10,000 baby Kevins a year until 1995 when it dipped to some 8,000 and progressively dwindled thereafter.

Mocked and shamed 

By the time the Kevins hit adolescence in the early 2000s, Costner’s star power had faded and the name had become shrouded in stigma, associated with lower classes picking exotic-sounding names drawn from pop culture.

Sociologist Baptiste Coulmont studied the social determinism of French names by comparing the names with the childrens’ exam grades.

Between 2012-2020 four percent of Kevins received the top “very good” grade for the baccalaureate exam taken at the end of high school, compared with 18 percent for the classic bourgeois name Augustin.

For director Kevin Fafournoux, who grew up in what he calls an “ordinary” family in central France and is making a documentary called “Save the Kevins”, the name “spells redneck, illiterate, geek, annoying” for many in his country.

“All this has impacted my life and that of other Kevins, whether in terms of our self-confidence, professional credibility or in relationships,” he says in its trailer.

In Germany, which also saw a wave of Kevins in the early 1990s, the negative stereotypes conferred on parents who give children exotic-sounding names from other cultures has a name: Kevinismus.

“Kevin is not a name but a diagnosis,” said one teacher scathingly in a 2009 article by Die Zeit newspaper about little Kevins, Chantals and Angelinas being labelled problem children.

Shedding the stigma

As the years pass, Kevins have become doctors, academics, politicians and much more — and attitudes have shifted.

“There are tens of thousands of Kevins in France, they are everywhere in society and can no longer be associated with one background,” Coulmont told The Guardian newspaper in an interview in 2022.

That year, two Kevins were elected to parliament for the far-right National Rally (RN).

“Will the Kevins finally have their revenge?” asked Le Point magazine.

The RN’s president is himself a fresh-faced 28-year-old, who grew up in a high-rise housing estate on the outskirts of Paris. He also carries a name with clear American overtones: Jordan Bardella.

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