Violette

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.

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

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

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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.

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