For teenagers who like sexual content in their media (which is most of them), France seems like some kind of paradise. In 2015, we reported on Fifty Shades Of Grey getting a PG-12 rating, meaning any French 13-year-old could grab a baguette and head to the cinema to see Jamie Dornan doing stuff with Dakota Johnson and nobody would care. Now, another movie that has an R rating in America has received a PG-12 in France, suggesting that the country really is cool with letting teenagers enjoy some harmless sexual content.
However, the movie in question this time around is Sausage Party, which is primarily based on the inherent hilarity of combining Pixar-esque characters with adult themes (i.e. sex and stuff), so some of the stuffier members of French society are lashing out at the country’s National Center Of Cinematography over the PG-12 rating. According to Deadline, a anti-gay rights group called La Manif Pour Tous (The Protest For Everyone) has launched a Twitter campaign denouncing Sausage Party, with one tweet asking the CNC to explain how it can “authorize the screening of a giant orgy for the whole family.” Naturally, this tweet included shots from Sausage Party featuring food characters doing graphic-ish sex stuff with other food characters:
A website called Info Chrétienne also released a statement, asking the people of France to “not let the powerful pornography industry make your children its future zombie and drug addict customers. The effects of pornography on the brain are comparable to those of heroin!” (Again, this is for a movie where hot dogs make dick jokes, not actual pornography.)
Deadline notes that Sausage Party just hit French theaters this week, so nobody knows if this controversy will hurt the film, or if the people of France will end up being really into the idea of food having sex and making dirty jokes.