Violette
Director: Martin Provost
Writer: Martin Provost, Marc Abdelnour, René de Ceccatty
Cast: Emmanuelle Devos, Sandrine Kiberlain, Olivier Gourmet, Catherine Hiegel, Jacques Bonnaffé, Olivier Py

Plot:
In the middle of WW2 Violette Leduc (Emmanuelle Devos) lives with Maurice Sachs (Olivier Py) in the countryside. He tries to write, she tries to get by with black market sales. But mostly she wants his love but he isn’t having any of her neediness. So he tells her to write – and she throws herself into her writing. After Maurice leaves, Violette returns to Paris where she is first introduced to Simone de Beauvoir‘s (Sandrine Kiberlain) writing and then the woman herself. She hands Simone her first novel who gets her published. And so Violette’s career as a writer slowly takes off.

Violette was a mostly entertaining film, though it did have weaknesses. But since it’s a film about a queer woman and the woman who inspired her, I will let a lot of those weaknesses slide and tell you to see it anyway.

Violette Leduc apparently wasn’t an easy character, at least not in the film’s version. She was needy, obsessive, pushy, unforgiving and harsh. I don’t think I would have liked her if I had met her. But I loved that we got to see such a female protagonist for once: usually when there is a film about a woman in the first place, she often has to be this saintly apparition that is as perfect, likeable and pretty as a person can be. And there are so many movies about men who are assholes – so give me all the movies about female assholes, too. Simone de Beauvoir was complicated and not easy to like, but somehow you’re drawn to her just as much as Violette is. I probably would have been madly in love with her as well.

I liked that we got these two women in all their complexity and with all of their bad sides and that the writers let that happen without judging them for it. And yet, I would have loved if the script had been written by women as well. I have the suspicion that Violette would have been a little less hysterical than she was in this version.

But despite the characters and the wonderful performances by Sandrine Kiberlain and Emmanuelle Devos, the movie had lengths. Especially in the last third I wanted things to be a little more concise. Maybe if the movie had generally focused even more on the relationship between de Beauvoir and Leduc that effect could have been achieved. Particularly because those two women and their relationship was so fascinating.

Put altogether, though, the film is interesting and well-made and should definitely be seen, if only to introduce more people to another (queer) female writer who has been mostly overlooked by history.

Summarizing: watch it.