New Delhi: The French government has allowed actors to kiss on-screen once again, provided they test negative for Covid-19, possibly making France the first country to allow intimate scenes to return to cinema.
“Non, the kiss is not dead,” Franck Riester, the Culture Minister of the country, said Friday. Riester was reacting to a question about whether social distancing had put an end to love scenes, an element that happens to be at the heart of much of French cinema.
Film shoots resumed earlier this month in the country, but “they waited a bit before kissing,” Riester told French Radio.“They waited a bit before doing that kiss that is so important in cinema,” he said.
French cinema halls are slated to reopen Monday, after remaining closed for the last three months. However, cinema-goers will have to adhere to strict social distancing norms, by maintaining at least a one meter distance from each other.
The French movie industry is one of the biggest of all European film industries.
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Reister did not specify which film or which actors would be the first to get back to on-screen kissing. But he insisted l’amour or love wasn’t completely dead in French movies, despite the coronavirus pandemic.
Riester also said that the French government has set up a €50 million emergency fund to compensate French filmmakers for the long shutdown which resulted in significant losses for businesses.
The fund, besides helping finance new films, is also meant to cover costs resulting from halts in shooting if an actor or member of the production crew is found to have contracted the virus.
Until last week, actors were required to stick to guidelines that made it impossible to shoot intimate scenes.
As a result, filmmakers had to rewrite screenplays and change shots, in order to minimise the risk of spreading Covid-19.
Marina Foïs, an actor who featured in the Asterix film Mission Cleopatra (2002), said social distancing rules had rendered movie-making virtually impossible.
“They said ‘no kissing’, OK,” she said. “But social distancing doesn’t work on film sets if you can’t get closer than 1.5 metres.”
She said it was “absurd” that insurance companies were forcing actors and directors to observe rules that stopped them working, The Telegraph reported.
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