To mark five years of the #MoiAussi (#MeToo) movement, The duty offers a series of texts showing the path taken or drawing up an inventory in different cultural sectors.
Since its release on Netflix, the film Blonde hair divides with its portrait of a Marilyn Monroe abused on all sides. In a recent interview with New Yorker, Joyce Carol Oates, whose “fictional biography” of the starin the running for the Pulitzer, had also proved divisive, affirmed that it is thanks to the #MeToo movement if the filmmaker Andrew Dominik was able, after ten years of vain attempts, to carry out this adaptation which the author described on Twitter of “striking, brilliant, very disturbing, and completely feminist”. In addition to sharing in all respects the opinion of Joyce Carol Oates, we will go further by noting that #MeToo, or #MoiAussi, has inspired several powerful works.
In fact, the creation of the movement denouncing sexual assault and harassment against women as well as the culture of rape dates back to 2006, when activist Tarana Burke laid the foundations. However, it was in 2017, in the wake of a wave of denunciations made against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, who has since been imprisoned, that the movement and the hashtag went viral.
This means that cinema and #MeToo are intimately linked. For the record, the now famous article in the New York Times in which actresses Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan, among others, testified against Weinstein was released on October 5, 2017. One of the most anticipated films this year, She Saidby Maria Schrader, on display in November, will return to the investigation carried out by journalists Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan).
Until then, The Wizard (L’assistante), released in 2019, constitutes a fascinating preamble to She Said since this minimalist, but discreetly ruthless film, written and directed by Kitty Green, offers an anxiety-provoking incursion into the monster’s lair. All told from the point of view of a young assistant (brilliant Julia Garner), who, on the one hand, is a victim of the misogynistic culture of the production company that employs her, and, on the other hand, closes eyes on the abuse and assaults perpetrated by his boss. Harvey Weinstein is not named, but the allusions are unequivocal.
Never put on trial, Roger Ailes is nevertheless another mogul caught up in sexual allegations, which forced him to resign from his position as CEO of Fox News (in return for a severance package of $65 million). Released in 2019 too, bombshell (Scandal) looks back at events as seen by star reporter Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron), anchor Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman), and a fictional rookie (Margot Robbie).
If the film was directed by Jay Roach, it was first Charlize Theron, as producer, who fought for the project to see the light of day. Despite her screen presence, paired with that of two other leading actresses, bombshell nearly died on the soap opera. The newspaper The Independent, Theron explained:
“It’s a hard pill to swallow when you hear your financier wants to back off […] especially when it’s only half the cost of something they’ve already done with a man. »
Subversions and disagreements
Already iconic film, Promising Young Woman (A young woman full of promise), by Emerald Fennell, struck very hard in 2020 with its heroine (again Carey Mulligan, remarkable), who, in the evening, feigns drunkenness in order to trap unscrupulous, even criminal men. Dark and satirical, the film negotiates many unexpected turns en route to a devastating ending. In Vanity Fair, we headlined: “A Thelma and Louise for the #MeToo era”.
“This twisted ending, a bold choice by Fennell intended to shock an affable audience, is hard to watch — a punch in the gut that recalls not just violence against women, but violence against anyone who gets in the way of a man. white in America,” wrote journalist Molly Oswaks at the time.
And to continue: “However, the very funny scenario of Fennell makes us laugh until its bitter outcome […] Which hopefully provides ample food for thought for the audience. This is a brilliant use of comedy as a Trojan horse. »
The author adds that this is an “exciting and modern update” of the subgenre of “ fantasy revenge or “fantasy of revenge”.
Widely acclaimed, Emerald Fennell’s film nevertheless had detractors, including the columnist of the Guardian Adrian Horton, who wrote a column titled “How Promising Young Woman shows the limits of #MeToo revenge”. Last month, the author returned to the charge on the occasion of a column devoted to another film, and entitled this one: “The empty feminism of Don’t Worry Darling “.
“I wrote at the time how Promising Young Woman demonstrated the limits of #MeToo rage on screen; how the film’s insistence that everyone reach their worst potential seemed hopeless,” she added.
One thing is certain, the columnist, if she had seen him, could hardly have appreciated the subversive revengeunveiled on the festival circuit in the fall of 2017. Coralie Fargeat inverts the macho codes of a horrifying sub-genre, the “ rape-revenge », or « rape and revenge », by privileging the point of view of the protagonist and by exclusively « objectifying » the male antagonists who raped her (for once without it being shown) and left for dead.
In vogue, the headline read: “An exploitation film for the MeToo era”, describing the French director’s first feature film as a “radical provocation on the power of women” which “reverses” the phenomenon of exploitation.
Embrace the movement
We owe to another French director, Céline Sciamma, what will certainly remain as one of the movement’s flagship works, and a masterpiece, period: Portrait of the girl on firereleased in 2019 — definitely a big year.
The story of a thwarted love between a painter (Noémie Merlant) and a penniless noblewoman (Adèle Haenel) promised against her will to a rich sire, this film of staggering beauty deals, implicitly, with the speaking out of women, the filmmaker and screenwriter having imagined a host of conversations as exciting as they are enlightening for her heroines.
In interview at Paris Match, Céline Sciamma explained: “The film was imagined before [l’affaire Weinstein], but I wrote it afterwards. And he very consciously fits into this new context. »
Always at Paris Match, the filmmaker confided:
“The fact that there are no male characters is a real cinematic experience. There is a man at the beginning that we see again at the end and, like in a horror movie, everyone jumps in the room at that moment! We have to think about how we film women as subjects rather than as objects. And the cinema offers these possibilities, which I want to explore. »
Wise and inspiring words.
The films mentioned are offered in VOD on most platforms.