'Violette' Evokes Exasperating Self Pity, A Trait The French Like
Americans put a lot of stock in being likable. Pollsters take surveys of the president's likability. Test screenings check whether we like the characters in movies. And when a literary novelist like Claire Messud mocks the notion that fictional characters should be someone we'd like to be friends with, writers of popular fiction attack her for snootiness.
You rarely find such disputes in France, which finds our fetish of likability charmingly simple, rather like our shock at politicians committing adultery. Hooked on the fervent, the argumentative, even the crazy, the French really like liking unlikable characters.
You find a real doozy in the revelatory, strangely gripping new film Violette. It's a fictionalized portrait of Violette Leduc, the trailblazing French novelist who may have been even better at being a pain than she was at writing. An illegitimate child, Violette felt unwanted by her mother, and lugged her loveless sense of grievance through life like an accordion made of lead. Her key signature was exasperating self-pity.
Violette is played by Emmanuelle Devos, the terrific French actress whose striking broad features you may recognize from Read My Lips and Coco Before Chanel. When we first meet Violette, it's World War II, and she's working as a black marketeer and living with writer Maurice Sachs, whom she's furious with for not wanting to sleep with her – even though he's gay. Sachs soon flees her needy intensity, but not before encouraging her to write about her life – and keep writing.
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