Release of the French Biopic Violette
Violette tells the story of Violette Leduc, a forgotten but influential French writer.
The movie
It can definitely be said that Martin Provost loves the destinies of singular women. After his film about the painter Séraphine Louis, he became interested in the life of the novelist Violette Leduc, another marginal woman with a chaotic life and an unknown name. But this is no coincidence. In 2008, Martin Provost, filming Séraphine, read a Violette Leduc text about Séraphine. He met the author of a biography of the novelist and asked him to collaborate in an adaptation.
The film chronicles the relationship between the novelist and Simone de Beauvoir, love and admiration for the first, friendship and protection for the second. An illegitimate daughter who is gay, lonely, and holds a complex about her physical appearance, Violette Leduc has largely put her life in her novels.
Where is Jean Paul Sartre?
The film focuses on Violette's creative years and sometimes departs from historical rigor. Jean Paul Sartre is absent. Provost did not want to introduce a character who might have lead him away from his subject. It also appears that adapting Sartre life on the screen is scaring directors. Onefilmmaker ventured to do it for a TV movie. Sartre loved cinema. Often adapted, he worked himself into some adaptations and wrote original screenplays. We expect the biopic that will stage him!
Reviews on both sides of the Atlantic
Some have criticized that the direction is too classical or slow paced. Christophe Narbonne for the monthly Première mentions an expressionist direction and praises “a powerful reflection on the status of women and creation.” Pierre Murat of Télérama thinks what Provost succeeds beautifully in “filming these moments in the life of Violette as time off.” All reviews emphasize the subtlety and accuracy of Emmanuelle Devos and Sandrine Kimberlain, “two actresses in state of grace ”, according to Pierre Murat.
The movie has been screened at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival in April, and Kristin Tillotson for The Star Tribune also lauded the play of both actresses: “Emmanuelle Devos captures Leduc’s complicated torments without overplaying them, and Sandrine Kiberlain’s buttoned-up De Beauvoir provides the perfect foil.” She concludes that “not since Jane Campion’s ‘Angel at My Table’ has there been such a moving and meticulously crafted period biopic about a tortured feminist writer who deserves wider recognition.”
Sydney Levine on Indiewire, considers it “a stunning masterpiece”, “an intimate and powerful true story of the relationship between two extraordinary women in an extraordinary time.” According to her, Sandrine Kimberlain is “perfect” and Emmanuelle Devos “gives one of the most impassioned performances of her lauded career in the title role”.
