Stylish portrait of troubled French writer Violette Leduc, with a ferociously brave performance by Emmanuelle Devos at its centre.
Set in the suffocating glamour of the intellectual tobacco smoke of 1940s Paris, VIOLETTE tells the story of late-career triumph Violette Leduc (Emmanuelle Devos) and her relationships – platonic, professional or otherwise – with the various members of the French literati. A troubled, fundamentally unhappy woman in all matters of self-worth and daily life – and weighed down by a traumatic childhood and a marriage of naught but convenience – Leduc came to writing relatively late in life, taking to the pen as a sole source of impassioned respite from solitude. Recognition and critical acclaim came later still, after many years of being fruitlessly championed and supported by literary and feminist institution Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain).
“Devos is at once crazed, self-flagellating and despondent as Violette…”
It is the ongoing relationship between these two women on which Martin Provost’s film places its humanistic focus, bringing to light a fierce intensity on both sides, whether an obsessive sexual desire and emotional reliance on the part of Violette, or, for de Beauvoir, professional and bound by a sense of duty to the greater cause of Literature, Feminism and Art. Devos is at once crazed, self-flagellating and despondent as Violette, while Kiberlain offers a formidable yet kindly turn as de Beauvoir. This veritable library is completed by Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Jean Genet and Jacques Prévert, all of whom Violette comes across through de Beauvoir (and all of whom Provost introduces subtly yet directly with the breaking of the film into chapters, each titled and characterised by the crossing of paths of Violette and one of these others). But, as a frostily calm and dutifully compassionate de Beauvoir remarks, ‘one cannot be friends with Violette’. Acquaintance is made with many, deeper mutual feeling with few. Violette comes across as irritating and repellent in her self-pity, storming as she does through life and relationships in a barrage of tantrums and self-hatred which makes it impossible to warm to her.
“Violette’s insufferable and aggressive self-hatred which makes her, well, insufferable…”
Though it is often cited that it was Leduc’s supposed physical ugliness which kept her from forming functional and lasting close relationships, it is in fact here her insufferable and aggressive self-hatred which makes her, well, insufferable. Devos rampages through the film in a performance which must be congratulated for the extent to which she makes her character detestable – one soon loses sympathy for someone who has so much pity for themselves. And it is in this sense, one feels, which VIOLETTE triumphs. Though the stylish setting and exquisitely grim aestheticisation of late–20th-century Paris offer much, the film is truly affecting in its ability to make one react so impulsively, human to human.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzhp2PCOWfI