At the Cannes Film Festival opening night ceremony on Wednesday, an awkward rape joke was made at director Woody Allen’s expense.
In the aftermath of a scathing, damning The Hollywood Reporter article written by Allen’s son, Ronan Farrow, the atmosphere surrounding Allen’s festival opener, Cafe Society, was tense.
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Perhaps in an effort to break the mood, emcee Laurent Lafitte made the off-colour joke about rape, clearly comparing Allen to Polish director Roman Polanski, who was charged with rape in the past and fled to Europe to avoid imprisonment and deportation.
“It’s very nice that you’ve been shooting so many movies in Europe, even if you are not being convicted for rape in the U.S.,” said Lafitte.
The audience tittered nervously, while others gasped — but it didn’t faze Allen. According to Variety film reporter Ramin Setoodeh, Allen said he wasn’t offended by the joke to a table of Cannes attendees, which included some media.
Allen is notorious for not reading any articles about himself, especially those that address his alleged sexual abuse crimes, so it’s no surprise that the director claims he hasn’t read his son’s THR piece.
“I never read anything about me,” Allen said to Vulture. “Any of these interviews I do, anything. I said everything I had to say about that whole issue in the New York Times, I don’t know if you read it, some time ago. I have moved so far past that. You know, I never think about it. I work, and that’s the end of it for me. I said I was never gonna comment on it again because I could just go on endlessly.”
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Interestingly, THR was banned from a Thursday lunch event by Allen’s long-time publicist, Leslee Dart.
When asked why, Dart responded: “It’s only natural that I would show displeasure when the press, in this case The Hollywood Reporter, goes out of its way to be harmful to my client.”
Allen has a storied — and unproven in court — history of sex abuse and attraction to young women (even his own daughter, Dylan Farrow, has said that Allen molested her when she was a child).
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