Category: cinema

The near-entirety of an art collection belonging to Gérard Depardieu, the prolific French actor whose career was clouded in recent years by accusations of sexual assault and harassment, was sold at a two-day Paris auction this week that brought in 4 million euros, including fees, or about $4.2 million.

Over 230 items went under the hammer on Tuesday and Wednesday at a sale organized at the Hôtel Drouot by the Ader auction house, including paintings by Alexander Calder and sculptures by Auguste Rodin, whom Depardieu played in the 1988 movie “Camille Claudel.”

About 100 people crammed into the auction room on Tuesday night for the sale of the collection's most prominent items, including a small oil painting of a flower vase by Odile Redon, which sold for €50,000, and the three small Rodin sculptures, which sold for €15,000 to €65,000.

The star of the night seemed to be a 4.5-foot enlargement of “Walking Man,” a bronze sculpture originally made by Germaine Richier in 1945. The enlargement, which used to dominate Depardieu’s living room, was hammered up to €510,000 — but the auction house said in a statement Wednesday that the actor decided at the last minute not to sell the sculpture, and withdrew the lot.

“This is a serious collection,” David Nordmann, one of the two auctioneers at Ader in charge of the sale, said in an interview. “This is not the collection of a celebrity who bought artwork just to show off.”

Nordmann had previously worked with Depardieu when the actor sold off the contents of a Parisian fine dining restaurant that he owned. The two men stayed in touch and discussed the sale his art collection. Depardieu gave the go-ahead in early 2023, and let the auctioneer pick the pieces and set the prices.

“He loved to collect,” Nordmann said, recalling how Depardieu spent hours telling him about Matisse’s superiority to Picasso the first time he entered the actor’s home. But “at some point,” he added, “he reached the end of that process.”

He has also faced a growing number of sexual abuse accusations. In interviews in April with Mediapart, an investigative news site, 13 women — actresses, makeup artists and production staff — accused Depardieu of making inappropriate sexual comments or gestures during the shooting of films released between 2004 and 2022. Two other women made similar accusations against him in interviews this summer with France Inter, a radio station. Depardieu declined to be interviewed for this article, but has always denied any criminal behavior.

The turmoil in his personal life might have factored into his decision to sell, Nordmann said, “but not in the sense that he is trying to prove a point” or distract from the accusations.

“He wants to move on,” he said.

Some items sold at prices much higher than expected, including a 1928 portrait by Christian Jacques Bérard that sold for €55,000 euros, 11 times the low estimate, and a monochromatic ink composition by Jean Arp that sold for €20,000. But most pieces sold within the estimated range.

The collection, which skews heavily toward postwar abstraction and contemporary art, includes widely recognizable names — a Duchamp collage; several pieces by Miró. Depardieu appears to have favored rugged compositions, bold colors, thick brushstrokes and raw materials, in keeping with his larger-than-life personality, Nordmann said.

He refused to lend pieces for shows, Nordmann said, including the Richier sculpture, which was recently requested for a show at the Centre Pompidou.

The sale did not include any Depardieu memorabilia. But it attracted unusually large crowds, both during the sale and beforehand, as thousands of curious visitors crowded the Hôtel Drouot to get a peek at the actor’s collection before it was snapped up.

Depardieu is one of France’s most prominent and prolific lead actors, an internationally recognized figure who has played in the last 50 years in more than 250 movies, including “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “The Man in the Iron Mask,” and in TV shows like “Marseille.”

Over the past decade, though, Depardieu’s popularity has waned as personal scandals overtook his acting career. He became a Russian citizen in 2013 to avoid taxes in France, and has expressed a strong friendship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, although last year he denounced the invasion of Ukraine.

But the accusations of sexual abuse against Depardieu have been more damaging. He has not been convicted in connection with any of the accusations.

But Depardieu has been charged with rape and sexual assault in a case involving Charlotte Arnould, a French actress who has accused him of sexually assaulting her in Paris in 2018, when she was 22, during informal rehearsals for a theater production. Prosecutors had initially dropped that investigation in 2019, citing of a lack of incriminating evidence, but it was reopened in 2020.

The French movie industry has grappled with several high-profile accusations of sexual abuse in recent years and taken steps to address them. But mixed reactions to the #MeToo movement in France — which has also given a warm reception to artists accused of abuse — exposed sharp cultural divides between France and the United States.

Juliette Guéron-Gabrielle contributed reporting.

A third straight day of marathon negotiations between Hollywood studios and striking screenwriters ended on Friday night without a deal. But the sides made substantial progress, according to three people briefed on the talks.

The sides reconvened on Saturday.

The Friday session started at 11 a.m. Pacific time at the suburban Los Angeles headquarters of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the major entertainment companies. For the third day in a row, several Hollywood moguls directly participated in the negotiations, which ended a little after 8 p.m.

Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive; Donna Langley, NBCUniversal’s chief content officer of Universal Pictures; Ted Sarandos, co-chief executive of Netflix; and David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery had previously delegated bargaining with the union to others. Their direct involvement — which many screenwriters and some analysts said was long overdue — contributed to meaningful progress over the past few days, according to the people familiar with the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic nature of the efforts.

During the Thursday negotiations, the sides had narrowed their differences, for instance, on the topic of minimum staffing for television show writers’ rooms, a point that studios had been unwilling to engage on before the guild called a strike in early May.

The Thursday session took a turn, however, after the sides agreed to take a short break at roughly 5 p.m., according to the people familiar with the talks. The executives and studio labor lawyers had expected guild negotiators to return to discuss points they had been working on earlier. Instead, the guild made additional requests — one being that a return to work by screenwriters be tied to a resolution of the actors’ strike.

The actors’ union, known as SAG-AFTRA, joined writers on picket lines on July 14. Its demands exceed those of the Writers Guild. Among other things, the actors want 2 percent of the total revenue generated by streaming shows, something that studios have said is a nonstarter.

Several hours after talks ended on Thursday night, the guild emailed its membership to say that the sides would meet on Friday.

“Your negotiating committee appreciates all the messages of solidarity and support we have received the last few days, and ask as many of you as possible to come out to the picket lines tomorrow,” the email said.

The guild extended picketing hours on Friday to 2 p.m. Pickets have typically ended at noon.

In Los Angeles, several hundred writers turned up to picket outside the arching Paramount Pictures gate, far more than in recent weeks. The Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA have been staging themed pickets to keep members engaged, and the theme on Friday happened to be “puppet day,” meaning that, in addition to picket signs, some marchers held felt hand puppets and marionettes. The mood was optimistic.

Outside Netflix’s Hollywood offices on Friday afternoon, picketing writers even began offering goodbye speeches, delivered via bullhorn. At the CBS lot in Studio City, the theme was “silent disco,” with several hundred writers dance-picketing while wearing headphones.

The talks were mostly back on track by the time picketing ended on Friday, according to two of the people familiar with the matter. On the sticky issue of minimum staffing for television shows, the sides were discussing a proposal in which at least four writers would be hired regardless of the number of episodes or whether a showrunner felt that the work could be done with fewer. (Earlier in the week, studios were pushing for a sliding number based on the number of episodes.)

They were also discussing a plan in which writers would for the first time receive payments from streaming services — in addition to other fees — based on a percentage of active subscribers. The guild had originally asked the entertainment companies to establish a viewership-based royalty payment (known in Hollywood as a residual) to “reward programs with greater viewership.”

The writers have been on strike for 144 days. The longest writers’ strike was 153 days in 1988.

“Thank you for the wonderful show of support on the picket lines today!” the guild’s negotiating committee said in an email to members late Friday. “It means so much to us as we continue to work toward a deal that writers deserve.”

Nicole Sperling contributed reporting.

When Barton Fink, the neurotic screenwriter cooked up by the Coen brothers, scrambles to write a wrestling picture, his peers prescribe the basics. Tell us the man’s ambitions. Entangle him in a romance. You know the drill. Not even in Barton’s most delirious dreams could he have envisioned “Cassandro,” about a flamboyant, sequin-clad luchador who takes his ring name from a telenovela. But I bet Barton could have drafted the film’s outline, which uses the same squelchy gym bag of tricks as many underdog sports dramas.

Based on a real star of Mexican professional wrestling, or lucha libre, Saúl Armendáriz (Gael García Bernal) is a profoundly unusual athlete wedged into a biopic that sometimes feels like passable stage fighting: elegantly executed but drained of danger.

Directed by Roger Ross Williams (“Life, Animated”), the movie depicts the decisive, late-1980s period when Saúl ascended out of obscurity and into the big time, braving countless training montages and a few private miseries on his way to the top.

We meet the striver in Texas in early adulthood, when he is assisting his mother, Yocasta (Perla De La Rosa), with her laundry business and wrestling at a nearby club. Using the name El Topo (The Mole), he tumbles into the ring masked and petite, a pipsqueak doomed to act as a punching bag opposite giants. “Let me guess. You’re always cast as the runt?” challenges Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez), a local lucha hotshot and trainer. She spies potential in Saúl, and offers to coach him pro bono.

Colindrez, like many of the actors in this movie, is a superlative performer. Her character is granted little interiority — she serves by turns as Saúl’s fierce advocate and his shoulder to cry on — but alongside Bernal she radiates a cool glow fit for a film less shackled by the ebbs and flows of established convention. In conversations with Sabrina, Saúl toggles between English and Spanish, reserving the latter for colloquialisms or teasing, and the mixture gives their dialogue an organic rhythm. He uses the same blend of languages with his lover, Gerardo (Raúl Castillo), a married luchador with kids whom Saúl sees in secret.

Saúl’s sexuality is at once a major plot point and somewhat underexplored. With gentle nudging from Sabrina, Saúl, who came out as a teen and is supported by his mother, soon reinvents his ring persona as the campy Cassandro, an “exótico,” or luchador who plays with femininity. The character initially attracts slurs and heckling, but quickly (and perhaps too effortlessly) starts winning matches and becomes a fan favorite. This is an era when H.I.V. and AIDS panic was at its shrillest, and although the real-life Cassandro was sometimes rebuffed by homophobic opponents, the movie never mentions the epidemic. (Williams wrote the screenplay with David Teague.)

“Cassandro” is at its strongest when it zeros in on the relationship between Saúl and Gerardo, who share a physical intimacy that both echoes their fighting careers and acts as an escape from them. Alone, safe from onlookers, the pair tussle in bed. “Don’t you think he’s sexy?” Saúl says, referring to Cassandro as if he were a third person who might join them.

Williams, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, is an expert orchestrator of naturalism. The trouble is that lucha libre, built on glitz, is anything but naturalistic. The self-assured freedom Saúl channels in bed never makes its way into scenes in the ring, which tend to tire when they should dazzle.

Cassandro
Rated R for drugs and slugs. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video.

In the 1920s, the richest community in the world was the Osage nation concentrated in northeast Oklahoma. Thanks to the oil below their lands, tribal members were sitting atop a vast fortune. And they were spending it, too, on roadsters and Parisian couture; there was a Tiffany’s counter at the local trading post.

They merged their newly acquired fashions with their tribal customs and aesthetics — wearing traditional wool blankets with Stetsons and Spanish-heeled cowboy boots, and adding embroidery and bright plumage to the towering silk hats they wore at weddings.

That mix of styles is vividly on display in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s epic set in Osage territory and due Oct. 20. Based on the nonfiction best seller by David Grann, the movie stars Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone — a member of the Blackfeet and Nez Percé tribes — in a roaring crime saga about the murders that plagued the tribal nation starting in the 1920s, as the Osage’s white neighbors set out to strip them, by any means necessary, of their oil rights.

The culture clash was generations deep, said Julie O’Keefe, a member of the tribe and the film’s lead Osage wardrobe consultant. Her ancestors “had what I call Kardashian money dropped on top of them,” she said. They were economically savvy but until that era hardly even used a currency-based system: “We traded for everything that we needed.” The matriarch in the story, Lizzie Q, “had come off the prairie hunting buffalo.”

Led by Scorsese, the filmmakers aimed to be scrupulously authentic in the ways they depicted the Osage, down to the threads in their clothing. There was plenty of documentation: the Osage were rich enough to sit for portraits and even to make home movies — astronomically expensive at $800 a minute, said Jacqueline West, the film’s costume designer. “Few people in the world could afford that, but they documented their lives and their travel and where they lived so beautifully. I relied on those.”

The Osage always had an eye for luxe and color when it came to clothing and adornment, said Daniel C. Swan, an anthropology professor and curator emeritus at the University of Oklahoma who has written about the tribe. “If you read the 16th- and 17th-century accounts of encounters with them, they had this air about them — we would say they had real style,” he said.

By the early 20th century, the Osage were as au courant as Vogue editors. “They had incredibly sophisticated palettes,” Swan said. “They wore the finest French, Italian, New York fashion; they kept up with hairstyles and footwear.” But perhaps the best example of their sartorial resplendence, and their culture, could be seen at weddings.

The wedding scene in “Killers of the Flower Moon” is a showstopper, with Mollie Kyle, the bride played by Gladstone, and her bridesmaid sisters in richly embroidered skirts, finger-woven belts and bespoke military coats, complete with brass buttons and braided epaulets. The look is topped off by towering 18-inch hats decorated with French ribbon and festooned with feathers dyed cyan or magenta. It feels fantastical, and it is utterly real.

“When I saw the photographs of the wedding clothes, of course I had to include them,” Scorsese said.

The coats came into the Osage world entwined with American history. In the early 1800s, Osage leaders visited President Thomas Jefferson in the White House. It was part of a U.S. government effort to ingratiate itself with tribes along the path that the explorers Lewis and Clark would travel, and the leaders were greeted with military demonstrations that showcased the new country’s military might. The story goes that an Osage chief was taken with the coats worn by his Washington, D.C., counterparts, so they gave him one. It didn’t fit — Osage were exceptionally tall — and he passed it onto his daughter, who wore it to her wedding, a tradition that persisted for more than a century. (The top hats had a similar lineage — from headwear for infantry officers to party chapeau.)

Refashioning the attire of war for a bride, “there’s something beautifully rebellious about it,” West said. It’s a subversion of the dynamic Jefferson wanted to display: the Osage turned “something that represented power over them to something that represented joy.” They even made their own versions of the coats when the originals wore out.

“The U.S. government gave these coats out to all different tribes,” Swan said. But only the Osage remodeled them into wedding finery.

Swan, an author, with Jim Cooley, of “Wedding Clothes and the Osage Community,” organized a companion exhibition at the Sam Noble Museum in Norman, Okla., that Scorsese’s team visited early on in the film’s development. “As soon as they saw those wedding outfits, they said, ‘He’s going to love this! You can bet there will be a wedding in this movie,’” recalled Swan, who was also a resource for the film.

“The question is always: what do the clothes mean to the characters?” Scorsese wrote in an email. “They look flamboyant, but they were worn proudly and joyfully — they still are.”

West, the costume designer, used vintage pieces as inspiration, including heirloom garments that descendants of the real-life characters had stored away in trunks. As much as possible, she commissioned copies from Osage artisans.

With multiple crowd scenes, O’Keefe, who lives in Tulsa, called on every Osage maker she knew. “Everybody in the community made moccasins for this,” she said. The local nurse who gave her a Covid shot wound up doing ribbon work on two blankets. West’s wardrobe team of 10 picked up the slack, learning how to finger-weave at lightning speed. Normally tied over the back of a chair, one belt traditionally takes months to complete.

An Osage wedding was unlike any other Indigenous ceremony: a huge, multiday affair steeped in their culture of generosity. “From a very young age, I was taught that being Osage is about sharing and fellowship and taking care of one another,” said Shannon Shaw Duty, editor of Osage News, the tribal newspaper. “An Osage shows their wealth not by how much money they have, but by how much they give.”

For weddings a century ago, Swan said, “they would give away 50 or 60 heads of horse, feed 400 or 500 people for a week.” In one account from 1932, in Hominy, Okla., the father of the bride bought five new Chevrolet roadsters and gave them away, Swan added. “He said he spent some $50,000 on that wedding” — over $1 million in today’s dollars.

That level of festivity was generally reserved for the eldest sons or daughters of a family, during the era of arranged marriages, and was limited primarily to full-blooded Osage, like Mollie Kyle. Such festivities would have been unlikely for an Osage woman marrying a white man, as she does in the movie, Swan pointed out — but that was Scorsese’s creative license.

“We had many, many long discussions about this with members of the community,” Scorsese said. “In the end, we all felt strongly that the wedding clothes were so identifiably Osage that they had to be included.”

The scene is a moment of lightness in a story that is otherwise wrenching. In his book, Grann writes that there were probably far, far more deaths than the 24 that the F.B.I. arrived to solve.

O’Keefe grew up in Pawhuska, Okla., the capital of Osage lands. “Everybody has a connection to the story,” she said. “There isn’t a district that doesn’t, because everybody within our communities lost someone, our family members, due to strange circumstances.”

The wedding coats are one emblem from that time that has been rewoven again and again; after World War II, they were worn at the Osage’s traditional summer community dance, instead of at weddings. It’s a rare and vivid example of a historical garment that attains cultural longevity, Swan said, while also being “recharted.”

At a recent dance, there were six or eight “bridesmaids,” O’Keefe said, “dressed in all these different wedding coats and hats, that were all given away to families.”

Each woman only gets one outing with a coat. In a dance that has hardly changed for more than a century, it’s a deeply symbolic moment, Shaw Duty noted. “People will always remember who wore them, who made them,” she said. “It’s all our own little Osage world, going on here, and it fills us with happiness.”