Roman Polanski in Cannes: photo EPA/Ian Langsdon
Polanski made the remarks during a press conference promoting Venus in Fur, an erotic comedy based on the award-winning play of the same name.
“The pill has greatly changed the place of women in our times, masculinising her. It chases away the romance in our lives,” he said, as cited by the UK's Guardian.
Polanski argued that “trying to level the genders is purely idiotic,” lamenting that in today's times, “offering flowers to a lady has become indecent.”
The 79-year-old director made one of few recent public appearances at the festival, after being detained in Switzerland in 2009 after US authorities requested his arrest for unlawful sex with a minor in 1978. Polanski had fled to France, the country of his birth in 1979.
Since his 2009 arrest, he has visited Poland, where he lived from 1937 until the early sixties, as well as Switzerland, which had ultimately declined to extradite the director.
Venus in Fur wins favourable reviews
Although Venus in Fur failed to win the Palme d'Or, the crowning prize of the festival, it received largely favourable reviews.
The Hollywood Reporter concluded that Polanski’s “penchant for psychosexual mind games conducted in claustrophobic spaces is deliciously revisited in Venus in Fur.
“A teasing dialectic of subjugation and power, female objectification and emasculating rebuke, the film should titillate European audiences with its mischievous combination of think and kink, while seducing a more limited niche in the U.S.”
Britain's The Guardian described the film as “a playful if occasionally heavy-handed jeu d'ésprit on the subject of sexual role-play, the games we all play, illusion and reality, and directing as a sexual act.”
The Palme d'Or went to French drama Blue is the Warmest Colour, by Abdellatif Kechiche. (nh)
Source: The Guardian, AP