Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Tue Jun 10, 2014 7:37 am 
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EMMANUELLE DEVOS, SANDRINE KIBERLAIN IN VIOLETTE

The tough road of a pioneering French woman writer

This conventional but beautiful-looking biopic concerns a pioneering feminist literary figure of postwar France. Violette Leduc suffers all her life from being born illegitimate and without resources. But, as we see, in her late thirties she discovers a gift for turning her hard early life into novels. She becomes a protege of Simone de Beauvoir and her circle, including Sartre, Camus, and Genet. We meet Genet in the film, who, as played by Jacques Bonnaffé, is more sprightly and more a bon vivant than we might have thought. Sartre and Camus, perhaps, are deemed too sacred or too overpowering to represent on screen; we do not see them. De Beauvoir is stiffly played by Sandrine Kiberlain, who's excellent in romances and comedies but seems to lack the wherewithal to embody an intellectual giant. But her character is simply one-note as written, and her withholding manner is doubtless part of Simone's actual relation with the adoring Violette, who loved her and desired her sexually. As Violette herself we get Emmanuelle Devos, and she is more than worthy of the task. For his part, Provost is too reserved and unhip for the material. But there are rewards for watching, chiefly of an atmospheric and visual nature.

Martin Provost's biopic of an early twentieth-century outsider artist, Séraphine, won top French awards for the film and the lead performance by Yolande Moreau and did well at the box office. Séraphine appealed because of its haunting, unusual protagonist and a certain melancholy passion, though that film too was basically square. Viiolette, while always watchable, and more interesting to fans of French literature, feels more episodic. In fact it's divided into somewhat choppy and inexplicable people-chapters, "Violette," "Simone," "Jean," "Bertie," then taking a turn toward things with "Faucon," denoting Leduc's country retreat, discovered by accident, and "Batarde," signaling Leduc's breakthrough book. Pushed first by a male companion and later by De Beauvoir, Leduc pens a string of bold autobiographical novels that speak from first-hand experience of such taboo topics as childhood sexual abuse, lesbianism love, abortion, and illegitimacy. No matter how the present-day Violette is lonely, unhappy, and otherwise suffering, De Beauvoir just tells her to shut up and go on writing. Her first books, staring in 1947 under an obscure Gallimard imprint were barely distributed and largely ignored, but with Batarde, seventeen years later, she hits it big. And then we leave her. It's hard to recommend this movie except to diehard fans of French literature and cinema, but the austere streets and city spaces, the very particular interiors, and the Forties clothes are a sensual delight to the eye.

As for Violette Leduc herself, this is certainly a juicy role for Emmanuelle Devos, whose acting chops are at their peak, and though she's now fifty, she has no trouble playing the nearly-forty writer born in 1907. But she has been in better films. This part makes one think of Devos' performance as the misused spouse of Clovis Cornillac (himself then in the ascendant) in Gilles' Wife/La femme de Gilles (2004), which may make one realize that even in this far fuller role of an independent woman, Devos is still delineating repression and inward suffering. As an actress, Devos has nothing to prove. She has been a major French film actress and perhaps the most distinctive one for twenty years, enormously appealing and capable of romantic leads without needing the perfect diva looks of the past. The edge she can skirt is best shown in her performance as the deaf woman who becomes a partner in crime in Jacques Audiard's Read My Lips/Sur les lèvres, which won her her César. In Violette, Devos suffers more, and yet is tougher, because she does as De Beauvoir commands, and just goes on writing, however lonely and miserable she feels.

All this is part of the necessary ritual of the biopic. For the neutral viewer of the film, it's the palpable atmosphere of the late Forties, Fifties, and early Sixties, but mainly the late Forties, that provides the most interest. Provost begins in medias res, so to speak, with Leduc's dysfunctional and overdramatized testy relationship with the gay half-Jewish writer Maurice Sachs (Olivier Py), with whom she is living as his fake wife. He pushes her to write, but gives her little encouragement and no warmth. At the same time she is dealing very profitably in black market goods, which she does as long as she can, even after the war, till finally some of the stuff is just too easily and legally available for her to find buyers any more. When she discovers De Beauvoir through her latest book and shows her the manuscript of her first novel, L'Asphyxie, she brings her black market delicacies. De Beauvoir reads the manuscript, is impressed, and gets it published, but never seems to invite Leduc into her life, and barely into her apartment. There is no intense emotional relationship in the film. It focuses on the writing, the publishing, the dealing, the coming and goings. For literary fans, that may be enough, and the details of early censorship, publishers' neglect, and final breakthrough exciting. For me, what mattered was Violette's chic peaked Forties hats and tightly tailored jackets and the wintry use of natural light by Bruno Dumont regular dp Yves Cape. As the wealthy gay chocolate magnate and art patron Jacques Guérin who helped Leduc to get novels published in beautiful editions, the great Olivier Gourmet is appealing but a bit wasted.

Violette, 132 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2013 and played in other festivals including London and Los Angeles. It opens Friday, June 13 at Lincoln Plaza Cinema and Angelika Film Center in New York. It opened in France 6 Nov. 2013 to very positive reviews (Allociné press rating 3.5), though the less enthusiastic reviewers express the criticisms given above.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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