Macerat It's Difficult NOT To Enjoy This Movie

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Jenni Devyn Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Bob Taylor The beginning is great: Violette is living with Maurice Sachs in a Normandy backwater in 1942. With the war on, life is precarious for the budding writer; she is forced to go on the black market to deal in the essentials of life. Sachs obliges her to sit down and write about her childhood and youth, as a way to bring in some extra cash. Soon Sachs is off to Germany as a labourer (he hoped to ingratiate himself with the Nazis by hiding his Jewish past). Sachs dies, and Violette is off to Paris as soon as she can manage it. Soon she meets Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet and Jacques Guerin (who becomes her first publisher). She starts to travel, something a girl from a poor family usually doesn't get to do. Finally she becomes a member of the Gallimard stable of writers; fame and some fortune are hers at last.Emmanuelle Devos impressed me very much with her tenacity in bad times and her masochistic devotion to Beauvoir. Sandrine Kiberlain, reed-thin and erect of bearing, looked and sounded very much like Beauvoir. Olivier Py as the sleazy Sachs stole all his scenes.

secondtake Violette (2013)Violette Leduc was a French novelist who approached female sensual and sexual subjects, including lesbian affairs, with fresh and original directness. This is one story of her life. portrayed as largely tormented and often filled with a sense of hopelessness. Her writing and her love life was constantly ravaged.But this all happens in beautiful France, so the movie is a gorgeous meandering journey through the 20th Century in pastel, gloomy, golden, timeless countryside. And in the end, for those who care about the real woman, she overcomes. Her death to breast cancer (not in the movie) is just the sad inevitable darkness that seemed to follow her even during the brightness of a great and daring mind.There is no strong narrative propulsion here, for sure. To like this you'll have to enjoy lingering, and sometime in zones of brown melancholy. I did like that, and liked all of the movie, even if I found myself physically restless, too. I can't see how it could have been done differently, but it's good to have poetic patience (or patience for poetry). The acting, it must be emphasized, is vivid and raw in a modernist way not far from the many bits of text taken from Leduc's writing. Emmanuelle Davos makes no compromise in her showing both the deeply unhappy and the hopeful sides of this woman. And Sandrine Kaberlain is a severe and knowing Simone de Beauvoir, the famous author who comes again and again to Leduc's aid. The implied love affair, fractured and incomplete, between these two is an important if somewhat thinly sketched part of the larger picture for the title character.This is all moving, great stuff. There is an echo (or a harbinger) of another pair of women drawn with artistry and love in a recent movie, "Reaching for the Moon" (which I liked a lot). But such a different ambiance here, all dank and fearful with shafts of sunlight only sometimes felt. I recommend them both, but this one will require slowing down and appreciating the mood as much as the details of this intense, ordinary biography.

Red-125 The French film Violette (2013) was directed by Martin Provost. It tells the story of Violette LeDuc, who's was considered an important feminist author in the postwar period, but who is now largely forgotten except by feminist scholars.When the film opens, Violette (played by Emmanuelle Devos) is running from the police. We assume that she's wanted by the Gestapo, but, in fact, she is just caught hiding some black-market food, for which she spends a few days in prison.Eventually, after the war, LeDuc goes to Paris, where she is befriended by Simone de Beauvoir (played by Sandrine Kiberlain). LeDuc is introduced to de Beauvoir's circle-- Sartre, Camus, Genet. LeDuc began to write--mainly semi-autobiographic novels--that attained some popularity, despite being heavily censored. The censorship was due to the lesbian content, as well as the graphic sexuality. (Tame subjects now, but not in post-war France.)I didn't enjoy this movie much. Violette, as portrayed in the film, wasn't really a fascinating character. The movie ran for over two hours, with too many scenes of discussions in publishers' offices. I thought the best component of the film was Kiberlain's portrayal of Simone de Beauvoir. Her Beauvoir was beautiful in a non-traditional way, and very forceful and direct. Despite the title of the movie, the screen didn't light up when LeDuc was portrayed. For me, Beauvoir was the character who was truly at the center of the movie.We saw this film at the Little Theatre, as part of ImageOut, the admirable Rochester LGBT Film Festival. It will work well on DVD.

Sindre Kaspersen French actor, screenwriter and director Martin Provost's fifth feature film which he co-wrote with screenwriters Marc Abdelnour and René de Ceccaty, is inspired by the life of a French 20th century author. It premiered in the Special Presentations section at the 38th Toronto International Film Festival in 2013, was shot on locations in France and is a France-Belgium co-production which was produced by producers Miléna Poylo and Gilles Sacuto. It tells the story about a daughter and sister named Violette Leduc who was born in the late 1900s in Arras in the commune of Pas-de-Calais in Northern France, at that time derogatorily called a bastard, who lived with her mother named Berthe and grandmother named Fidéline, met a man named Ernest Dehous in 1913 and who had begun her initial education at collége Valenciennes when the First World War started. Distinctly and subtly directed by French filmmaker Martin Provost, this quietly paced and fictionalized reconstruction of real events which is narrated mostly from the main character's point of view, draws a heartrendingly humane portrayal of a French citizen whom in the early 1940s during the Second World War in Normandie, France, met a Jewish Roman Catholic writer named Maurice Sachs, as a 33-three-year-old wrote for the first edition of the magazine Pour Elle and the daily newspaper Paris-Soir and who after the liberation of France was introduced to a French novelist and playwright named Jean Genet and a French perfumer and collector named Jacques Guérin. While notable for its versatile and atmospheric milieu depictions, reverent cinematography by cinematographer Yves Cape, production design by production designer Thierry François and costume design by costume designer Madeline Fontaine, this character-driven and narrative-driven story about significant people in the history of French culture and a memorable person who got her first novel called "In the Prison of her Skin" published in 1946, depicts an internal study of character. This densely historic, at times humorous and conversational reminiscence which is set in France in the 20th century and where a boarding school student and alumni at Lycée Racine in Paris, France who in the mid-1960s met a French author named Françoise d'Eubonne and whose life was marred by the ... of being born, starts an invaluable friendship with a French 20th century thinker who was writing a book and who encourages her to go on writing and use her personal experiences, is impelled and reinforced by its cogent narrative structure, substantial character development, subtle continuity, use of music, comment by Madame Simone Ernestine Lucie Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir: "The way you see yourself has changed." and the majestic acting performances by French actresses Emmanuelle Devos and Sandrine Kiberlain. A reflectively biographical, eloquently literary and lyrically cinematographic narrative feature.