PARIS: The official poster for this year’s Cannes film festival sparked an outcry over claims that Tunisian-born Italian actress Claudia Cardinale’s thighs had been airbrushed to make them thinner.
French media poured scorn on the festival for seemingly tampering with a photograph of Cardinale swirling her skirt on a Rome roof in 1959.
“Claudia Cardinale dropped a dress size in one swirl,” said the left-leaning Liberation, while the culture magazine Telerama questioned why it was necessary to retouch the star when she was in her heyday.
“While the poster is magnificent, the photograph has clearly and deplorably been airbrushed to thin the actress’s thighs. What a pity,” it said.
There was a similarly hostile reaction on social media, with one Twitter user saying, “If even Claudia Cardinale cannot represent beauty without being retouched, we really are in trouble.”
Others bemoaned the “dictatorship of thinness” or claimed that “Cardinale wasn’t thin enough for Cannes.”
The actress, now 78, was unimpressed by what she called a “fake row.”
“This image has been retouched to accentuate this effect of lightness and transpose me into a dream character,” she told Huffington Post. “This concern for realism has no place here and, as a committed feminist, I see no affront to the female body. There are many more important things to discuss in our world. It’s only cinema.”
Cardinale said in a statement released by the festival that she was honored to feature on the poster for its 70th anniversary year.
“That dance on a roof in Rome... reminds me of a time when I could never have imagined climbing up the red-carpeted steps of the most celebrated” film festival in the world.
But Claire Serre-Combe, of the French women’s group Osez le feminisme! (“Dare to be Feminist”), said it was a scandal that Cardinale who was “thin and magnificent in the original photo,” should have to “lose kilos” for the poster.
The festival’s director Thierry Fremaux told AFP that the poster had been “very well received.”
French media poured scorn on the festival for seemingly tampering with a photograph of Cardinale swirling her skirt on a Rome roof in 1959.
“Claudia Cardinale dropped a dress size in one swirl,” said the left-leaning Liberation, while the culture magazine Telerama questioned why it was necessary to retouch the star when she was in her heyday.
“While the poster is magnificent, the photograph has clearly and deplorably been airbrushed to thin the actress’s thighs. What a pity,” it said.
There was a similarly hostile reaction on social media, with one Twitter user saying, “If even Claudia Cardinale cannot represent beauty without being retouched, we really are in trouble.”
Others bemoaned the “dictatorship of thinness” or claimed that “Cardinale wasn’t thin enough for Cannes.”
The actress, now 78, was unimpressed by what she called a “fake row.”
“This image has been retouched to accentuate this effect of lightness and transpose me into a dream character,” she told Huffington Post. “This concern for realism has no place here and, as a committed feminist, I see no affront to the female body. There are many more important things to discuss in our world. It’s only cinema.”
Cardinale said in a statement released by the festival that she was honored to feature on the poster for its 70th anniversary year.
“That dance on a roof in Rome... reminds me of a time when I could never have imagined climbing up the red-carpeted steps of the most celebrated” film festival in the world.
But Claire Serre-Combe, of the French women’s group Osez le feminisme! (“Dare to be Feminist”), said it was a scandal that Cardinale who was “thin and magnificent in the original photo,” should have to “lose kilos” for the poster.
The festival’s director Thierry Fremaux told AFP that the poster had been “very well received.”
