Noémie lives in a youth center. For two years, the Quebec government has preferred to withdraw custody of this teenager from her mother. Moreover, this one does not want to recover it. An unbearable rejection for Noémie, who prefers to run away rather than stay in the center. Outside, she finds another runaway: her friend Léa, who seems to be leading the high life in Montreal with her boyfriend. What she will quickly learn is that this mogul life, Léa finances it with her body.
She who is only 17 does the escort every night. Introduced into this dubious circle, Noémie falls under the spell of one of the boys who, while their bed is still warm from their antics, offers her to become an escort too, during the Formula 1 Grand Prix. chill », « it’s just ass », as they say. However, Noémie does not want to. Until she snaps and says yes.
There are films that we watch for pleasure, films that talk about pleasure and that we enjoy watching, and films that talk about the pleasure of some people and that we watch with a certain displeasure. Noémie says yes, the first feature film by director and screenwriter Geneviève Albert, falls into the latter category. Let’s get along well. Out of displeasure, you have to understand disturbing, sometimes even difficult to bear, and that’s the whole brilliance of this raw and uncompromising film.
Behind the make-up and the roar of the prestigious Grand Prix de Montréal, Geneviève Albert, as accustomed to fiction as to documentaries, paints a sinister, cynical, iniquitous and frighteningly realistic scene. The director, who has secured the collaboration of real prostitutes to be as faithful as possible to reality, limits aesthetic shots in favor of a raw image. Using a steadycam, the lens is always as close as possible to Noémie and her reality, in all that she has that is violent. This violence is not limited to the physical, to passes – even if this would be quite enough – it is also psychological. Noémie does not suddenly decide to prostitute herself. She is carefully manipulated into believing that the problem is not prostitution, but her and her idea of it.
However, Noémie is not the only one to be manipulated. So is the viewer. Masterfully playing with her screenplay, Geneviève Albert tightens up a notch in each scene the wolf trap in which her heroine has had the misfortune to set foot. We, the spectators, unlike the characters in the story, already know that things are going to turn out badly, but can do nothing but watch, sadly and helplessly, like Cassandra, at the expected outcome.
And what awaits him is tough. For her and for the viewer. Anne Claire Poirier — in the guise of Monique Miller — was surprised, in her film die loud, that by showing the rape scene to a man around him, he was despite everything — and in spite of himself — excited by the images. This cannot be the case at any time in Noémie says yes. While Anne Claire Poirier had taken the side of a subjective camera to show the rape from the point of view of the victim in its entirety, Geneviève Albert, she chose to spare us the complete pass to keep only the most disturbing details. To the first customer, everything is fine. In the third, we begin to want it to stop. At the twentieth, we beg for it to stop. It is an avalanche of diverse and varied practices, barely shown, but each more unbearable than the other, client after client, that the director takes malicious pleasure in counting down as if it were also a great price.
Compared to these normal men, Noémie is little more than a drifting soul. Its interpreter, Kelly Depeault, already acclaimed in The Goddess of Fireflies, burns with intensity. Her subtle and nuanced acting was made to meet the director’s long shots. Simply breathtaking, the performance of the young actress, whose frail shoulders carry almost the entire film, grabs you in the gut and leaves a lasting mark.
You’ll never see the Grand Prix the same way again. Sensitive souls refrain.