The actor Gérard Depardieu has expressed sympathy for sex addiction sufferers, such as the fictionalised version of Dominique Strauss-Kahnhe plays in a new film at the Cannes film festival.
The film's director, Abel Ferrera, confirmed in a press conference late on Saturday evening that Welcome to New York was in part inspired by the story of Strauss-Kahn, who quit as head of the International Monetary Fund in 2011 after being arrested for the sexual assault of a maid in a Manhattan hotel. The charges were eventually dropped and the two parties reached a settlement at the end of 2012. Other cases against Strauss-Kahn were dismissed, although one relating to "aggravated pimping" in Lille is still outstanding.
Ferrera's film stars Depardieu as an international financier called Devereaux who has designs on the French presidency. Despite protestations that he's "no spring chicken", Devereaux exhibits remarkable stamina for drink, drugs and sex. On a business trip to New York, he sleeps with at least four women on the night before he assaults a hotel maid after his morning shower.
Making his first appearance at Cannes since becoming a Russian citizen in early 2013, Depardieu said he had been attracted to the role in part because it explored lust, and it showed "that one is not necessarily responsible for that lust. In a way I pity those who suffer from such a sickness."
"We all have compulsion," he continued. "I never questioned the morality of my character – that was not the point. What I saw was that this man was not like me at all. But I do understand impulses and that you can get crazier and crazier as they come.
"I think anybody could have these kind of impulses. And there's something very tough in the act of surviving when you have this sickness. In all of us we know there is a monster there; that there's something not quite normal."
Questioned about why the bedroom scenes were of such length and frankness, Bad Lieutenant director Ferrara, who spent two years researching this film, said he felt they were required on account of the "documentary" style. He had shown the film to Bernardo Bertolucci, he said, who compared its verisimilitude to the work of Andy Warhol. "It's fly-on-the-wall. It is what it is."
Depardieu emphasised both his own hatred for sexual violence and his conviction that the film was not pornographic as he – as a "normal actor" – would therefore have been incapable of making it.
Depardieu added that although he had Strauss-Kahn "in the back of my mind at all times" during the shoot, the intention was "absolutely not to be like him, to look or sound like him".
A veteran of the Cannes festival, Depardieu was sanguine about his film's status in this 67th edition as a "special screening" - meaning that's ineligible for an awards: "I don't think about this at all, frankly."
Source: theguardian
Source: theguardian
