Violette

[WhizzerMarvin]

Posted: 6/16/14 at 12:33pm

I saw this biopic about Violette Leduc this weekend and really liked it. At 2.5 hrs it's a tad slow in the middle, but her life and writing career was always interesting enough to keep me engaged.

So often now bio movies, plays and musicals tend to be just a dramatization of the subject's Wikipedia page, but Violette takes a more unusual approach. It begins with Leduc as a grown woman and refreshingly never even gives us flashbacks into her childhood. The director also never notes the time nor place as the film moves through the next 20 or so years of her life. Things happen in basically chronological order, but he's not afraid to mix things up. The movie is divided into sequences (I. Maurice, II. Simone, etc) that show her life in relation to people or places that had significance to her.

Emmanuelle Devos was excellent as Leduc and Sandrine Kiberlain should get her own film about Simone de Beauvoir.

I haven't actually read anything by either of the authors, but it made me want to investigate their works. Overall a great film about literary and gay history.

[henrikegerman]

Posted: 6/16/14 at 4:54pm

Thanks, Whizzer

"Emmanuelle Devos was excellent as Leduc and Sandrine Kiberlain should get her own film about Simone de Beauvoir."

I would love to see a movie of de Beauvoir's great - and very filmable - roman a clef "The Mandarins" Or maybe a mini series. Perhaps Devos could play Anne.

[WhizzerMarvin]

Posted: 6/16/14 at 7:52pm

How is The Mandarins? Is it an easy read or fairly dense?

The film shows Simone winning the Prix Goncourt for the novel.

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 6/16/14 at 8:12pm

The Mandarins, IIRC is pretty dense but worth the effort--of course I read it 15+ back, but parts of it have stayed with me.

de Beauvoir seems to currently be out of fashion, so I can't see The Mandarins being adapted anytime soon, but stranger things have happened, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it come back in vogue. Everyone my parents age, however, I've encountered seems to have an old copy on their shelf.

Violette sounds worth giving a chance--it wasn't even on my radar.

[WhizzerMarvin]

Posted: 6/16/14 at 8:28pm

Why do you think de Beauvoir seems to be out of fashion?

I really wanted to get a copy of In The Prison of Her Skin, but the only English translations on amazon seem to be out of print and rather expensive. Maybe this film will prompt a reprinting of some of Leduc's works.

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 6/17/14 at 12:08am

I'm not sure actually--that's an interesting question. Maybe she's more popular still in France? But I think it's just changing times--often writers like her (this is very broad, I know) seem to be very popular--even if people hadn't read her, I think many knew who she was, knew about The Second Sex, etc. Perhaps her sorta existential feminism seems old-hat now? I suspect her time will come back around though--things like this tend to be cyclical. I recently read an article about how Mahler was suddenly rediscovered in the 60s/70s and was played on symphony programming, more people seemed tohave the Mahler soundtrack to Death in Venice than even saw that movie etc--and then people got tired of him again. And now he seems to be popping up a lot more, again. Sorry, that's a poor analogy, but I think it is true. (On the other hand I would be fine with certain once ubiquitous writers like John Updike never became popular again :P )