There is one way and only one way to respond to the soon-to-screen Venice Film Festival films by Woody Allen (Coup de Chance), Roman Polanski (The Palace) and Luc Besson (DogMan). And that way is this: Judge these three movies according to classic standards — how well do they work according to their own scheme and aesthetic? — and leave your 100% repulsive, nickle-and-dime woke moralizing out of it.
Many influential artists have lived problematic lives (however you want to define that), and nobody gives a shit about this when they’re staring at a Paul Gaugin painting in a museum, or watching Mel Gibson in the first two Mad Max films or in Peter Weir‘s The Year of Living Dangerously, or listening to the music of James Brown or Richard Wagner or considering the work of any other flawed creator.
It’s called “separating art from the artist”…period. There is no mature or realistic way of responding to art without doing this. You’re not a bad person for finding spiritual payoff and transcendence in art created by questionable artists, but you are a bad person when you insist on ostracizing and diminishing artists not for their work but for certain personal, private behaviors.
Talk about their moral failings all you want (it has been the HE position all along that the accusations against Allen are exceedingly flimsy and unreliable, and strongly contradicted by official investigations), but keep them in a separate box.
Oh, and on a personal note? Aside from the woke-nutter chorus (some of whom unfortunately reside in the HE comment threads), most sensible humans out there despise judgmental scolds. I’m speaking in this instance of tiresome people like THR‘s Scott Roxborough, Agence France-Presse editor Eric Randolph and French feminism activist Ursula Le Menn. Wokesters are the plague dogs of our time. They are proponents of Soviet-styled social propaganda and the absolute enemies of free thought and free cinema.
