Word: depardieu
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CINEMA A marvelous melodramatic hubbub from Gerard Depardieu...
Besides, Leopold (Gerard Depardieu), the town drunk who also happens to be the town innkeeper, creates all the melodramatic hubbub their little community can tolerate -- or a good movie requires. A poet manque as well as a sometime black marketeer, he has the manners of a thug and the soul of a romantic. When he is falsely accused of harboring the collaborator (and briefly jailed), his outrage, hugely comic but strangely blackened around the edges, is marvelous to behold...
...Depardieu writes large what the other players in this typically French -- that is, typically terrific -- ensemble write small: the complexity of human motives at delicately stated cross-purposes. To an American observer, accustomed to watching actors struggle to find more than one dimension in their movie roles, the sight of actors comfortably, gratefully inhabiting contradictory, fully human roles is this movie's great pleasure...
...France, where sex is treated more casually and public figures are protected more carefully by the press, the brouhaha was seen as another example of American prudishness. Some political leaders even charged that it was part of a conspiracy to hurt Depardieu's chances for an Oscar. Minister of Culture Jack Lang, a frequent critic of American "cultural imperialism," lambasted the "low blow against one of our great actors." Raged Jacques Attali, a former aide to President Francois Mitterrand: "This is a vile defamation with a high financial payout...
...fact, Depardieu was always a long shot for the Oscar; no one has ever won a Best Actor award for a non-English-speaking role. And though Cyrano itself lost the Best Foreign Film award to a dark horse, such upsets are common. Still, a cultural chasm remains. Rosemary Dempsey of the National Organization for Women claims that the French reaction "trivializes the whole issue of violence against women." French author Marguerite Duras, asked about Depardieu's remarks, said dismissively, "When I was 8 1/2, I stole an apple from the garden." Depardieu, meanwhile, was on the island of Mauritius...