"Dude, you like to have sex with children, fuck you."

[muckefuck]

I ❤ Luc Besson.

I confess, I don't have much affection for his movies, which with few exceptions belong to the class of slick actioners which are designed to deliver a kind of visceral thrill that I've mostly outgrown. And, yes, he's a great big lovely bear-man, but as recently discussed in aadroma's journal, there can be a sizable gulf between lusting after a man and loving what he does. No, what pushed my vaguely positive feelings toward him into outright admiration was his comments on the recent arrest of the world's most beloved fugitive child rapist:

"This is a man who I love a lot and know a little bit," Mr. Besson said in a radio interview with RTL Soir. "Our daughters are good friends. But there is one justice, and that should be the same for everyone. I will let justice happen." He added, "I don’t have any opinion on this, but I have a daughter, 13 years old. And if she was violated, nothing would be the same, even 30 years later."

You might've missed these remarks if you've been keeping this particular circus at arm's length, which I can't blame you for given what an unedifying and at times sickening spectacle it's been. (Bernard-Henri Lévy has had some surprisingly good things to say in the past despite having both "French" and "philosopher" in his job title--particularly regarding exactly the kind of knee-jerk French lefty anti-Americanism that seems to be in play here--but describing a man who at the age of 44 drugged and sodomised a thirteen year-old as perhaps guilty of "committ[ing] a youthful error" vitiates any number of them.) I'm not surprised to see so many signatures from French glitterati--and I don't want to think too hard about the motives of 40+ straight male heterosexual signatories like Scorsese, Soderbergh, and (let the snerking begin) Woody Allen--but it's particularly dismaying to see names of artists whose body of work I greatly admire, such as Fanny Ardant and Pedro Almodóvar. I'm trying to see their response in the best possible light, i.e. as a misguided desire to heed the victim's wishes and shield her from further unpleasantness. But it's not really working for me. I feel terribly for her, but it's much more than her rights that are at stake at this point.

ETA: princeofcairo informs me that Kevin Smith has Twittered "Look, I dig ROSEMARY'S BABY; but rape's rape. Do the crime, do the time." So there: That leaves two hot bear directors whose movies I can still enjoy in good conscience.