Consent | The wolf and the lamb

During a dinner with her mother’s friends, 13-year-old Vanessa meets a famous fifty-year-old writer who sets out to seduce her.

Fairly faithful adaptation of Vanessa Springora’s book published by Grasset in 2020, The consentby Vanessa Filho (Angel Face), written with the collaboration of François Pirot (Mobile home), is a difficult film to watch, even nauseating. Not because it is a failure – it still competes in the Best Adaptation category at the Césars –, but in its desire to show what happened between the author when she was a minor (Kim Higelin, nominated in the category Best Female Revelation at the Césars) and Gabriel Matzneff (Jean-Paul Rouve) in the latter’s shabby maid’s room.

Certainly, the scenes of a sexual nature in which the 21-year-old actress and the 57-year-old actor lend themselves were tactfully directed by the director. If the light of the director of photography Guillaume Schiffman (Nothing to lose, by Delphine Deloget) does not seek to be caressing, as in Vanessa’s daydream scenes, certain slightly aesthetic framings provoke unease. Was it really necessary to go this far to recall the attacks that Vanessa Springora described with reserve?

While the author meticulously dissected the influence her tormentor had over her, the filmmaker set out to create an anthology of empty words and unhealthy considerations about love drawn from Matzneff’s work. Brought together in this way, these extracts suggest that the literary reputation of the notorious child molester, whom Denise Bombardier courageously stood up to in the face of a playful Bernard Pivot and his complacent guests, was overrated.

This decision to give the floor to Matzneff, who becomes in the guise and through the voice of Rouve an abject cold-blooded animal, almost relegates his victim to the shadows, who appears as an adult when too much enters the scene. late Élodie Bouchez. However, we must salute the sensitive playing of Kim Higelin. In a few words, with the awkwardness of a teenage girl feeling bad about herself, the actress manages to express in turn the emotion of being noticed by a man – even if her mother (Laetitia Casta) tells her that he is a pedophile – the dismay in discovering, through his books, the truth about him and the shame of having been trapped like several other boys and girls.

This could partly explain the film’s popularity among teenagers. When it was released in the fall in France, Vanessa Filho’s film helped free the voices of many young people on TikTok. Failing to be a great cinematographic success, this Consent has the merit of doing useful work.

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Biographical drama

The consent

Vanessa Filho

Kim Higelin, Jean-Paul Rouve, Laetitia Casta

1:59 a.m.

6/10