Violette (2013)
Directed by Martin Provost

Film Review

In 2008, director Martin Provost scored a notable critical and commercial success with Séraphine, an insightful biopic about the self-taught painter Séraphine de Senlis.  Five years on, Provost turns his attention to another marginalised female artist who led a tortured and colourful existence, this time the great French writer Violette Leduc.   The two women have much in common - both were outsiders who were not recognised until late in their lives, and both were fragile, solitary individuals with a profound need to exteriorise their inner pain through their art.  As in his portrait of Séraphine, Provost is less concerned with Leduc's art than in exploring her complex personality, to get to the heart of the woman who would, after many years in obscurity, come to have a profound impact on French literature, with the help of another French literary giant, Simone de Beauvoir.

It is easy to see why de Beauvoir was drawn to Violette Leduc, and one of the most fascinating aspects of Provost's film is how the two women appear to feed off one another, both emotionally and creatively.  De Beauvoir, the cold but alluring intellectual, makes a vivid contrast with the passionate but physically repellent Leduc, the former restrained by reason and bourgeois decorum, the latter constantly giving way to her emotions and primitive desires.  These remarkable women are magnificently interpreted by two of France's finest actresses, Leduc by Emmanuelle Devos (rendered ugly by a prosthetic nose) and de Beavoir by Sandrine Kiberlain; through their committed performances, and a well-written screenplay, we gain a genuine insight into what was, arguably, for both women the most important relationship of their lives.

Unlike her more repressed literary soul mate, Leduc had no qualms about using her own experiences as the basis for her novels, and her frankness when tackling issues around female sexuality (including abortion, incest and lesbianism) was perhaps the main reason why she found success so elusive.  The gradual erosion in Leduc's self-confidence as she fails to gain approval both in her professional and private life was the tragic central theme of her existence, and this is palpably rendered by Provost's film, an acceptance of failure that is constantly countered by an almost super-human desire to go on writing and putting onto the printed page those inner feelings that were tearing the author apart.  The main strength of Violette is the insight it provides on the psychology of that strangest of creatures, the vocational writer.

The film documents only the middle portion of Leduc's life, from 1942 to 1964, charting her long and arduous journey from aspiring novice writer to a bestselling author who so very nearly won the Prix Goncourt (France's highest literary award) with La Bâtarde.  Since Leduc's life was the inspiration for her novels, it is fitting that the film of her life should be divided into chapters, although, as the film progresses, this feels increasingly like an unnecessary contrivance that impedes the natural flow of the drama.  Violette is a slick period production, beautifully photographed and with an admirable cast, but it doesn't quite have the poetry and sophistication of Provost's previous biopic. 

The early part of the film depicting the author's wartime escapades and struggle to publish her first novel (L'Asphyxie) are offputtingly over-dramatised and a few of the scenes fail to ring true.  By the mid-point, however, the film has found just the right tone and what ensues is an altogether more considered and intelligent work, one that takes us slowly but surely into the heroine's fraught inner world and leaves us permanently scarred by the experience.  Just as Séraphine made us want to find out more about its subject and discover her art, so Violette compels us to want to visit the novels of Violette Leduc and gain a deeper appreciation of one of the most intriguing literary figures of the 20th century.

Film Synopsis

Violette Leduc, a woman born outside of wedlock at the start of the last century, meets the intellectual Simone de Beauvoir in St-Germain-des-Prés shortly after the war.  Thus begins an intense relationship between the two women which was to last both their lives - a relationship based on Violette's quest for freedom through writing and Simone's conviction that she has gained the confidence of a writer of rare talent...