At the start of 2023, as the awards campaign for Marie Kreutzer’s “Corsage” was in full swing, a bombshell landed: Florian Teichtmeister, one of its lead actors, was charged with possession of child pornography.
On Friday, Kreutzer debuts her latest film, “Gentle Monster,” in competition at Cannes. Its subject: a man is charged with possession of child pornography.
So, did the revelations about Teichtmeister – who pled guilty to the charge – influence “Gentle Monster”? “It didn’t really,” Kreutzer tells Variety. “The thing is, I was already working on the script before all that happened. Obviously, I was stunned, because I knew him.”
In “Gentle Monster,” we follow singer-pianist Lucy Weiss, played by Léa Seydoux, as she slides into a nightmare as the police investigate her husband Philip (played by Laurence Rupp), a filmmaker, after child porn is found on his computer.
“I read a newspaper article about the subject in 2020, and it was a very good piece of journalism, a long article, and very explicit,” she tells Variety. “It stayed with me, and I just felt like I had to do something, and the only thing I can do is tell a story about it.”
