Violette

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Martin Provost/Starring: Emmanuelle Devos and Sandrine Kiberlain

Director Martin Provost's Violette, could almost be a follow-up to his 2008 film Seraphine, as both films deal with French women whose art not only won them acclaim, but allowed them to abrade the near-impenetrable, chauvinistic social barriers maintained by the male-dominated cultural establishment.

Emmanuelle Devos (always excellent) plays Violette LeDuc, the emotionally-hungry and needy writer whose passionate, erotic, auto-biographical novels came to the attention of Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain) after World War II. We first see Violette living in a stiflingly bucolic French village where her homosexual significant other struggles to bring his own writing to the attention of the literary world. Though he respects Violette's opinion of his work, he is anxious to leave their rustic life without his wife. Trailing after her husband in his desperate flight from the country, she is abandoned. But Violette's own writing burgeons and after relocating to Paris, her novel L'Asphyxie (In the Prison of Her Skin) is brought to the attention of a publisher via de Beauvoir's efforts.

In meeting de Beauvoir, a kindred spirit whose own erotic prose and feminist candor matched Leduc's, Violette begins to demand love and attention. de Beauvoir bristles at Violette's repeated advances and her jealous inquiries about her lovers. In spite of the conflict, de Beauvoir tirelessly and unselfishly champions Violette's extraordinary, beautiful work; often negotiating with the publisher for Leduc's artistic freedom. In one scene, de Beauvoir cites the double-standard practiced in publishing by which Jean Genet enjoyed almost censor-free consideration while Leduc was repeatedly edited by publishers who were uncomfortable with a woman's confessional writing.

Devos and Kiberlain are terrifc as Leduc and de Beauvoir. Devos captures the psychological stresses Leduc endured: the stigma as a bastard child; her overprotective mother's attentions, episodes of frail mental health, the torments of unrequited love and the oppressive sexism of the time. Kiberlain is a bit too-willowy to be a physical match for de Beauvoir, but she inhabits the spirit of the famous writer; conveying not only her struggles, but also her strength.

Provost appropriately maintains the narrative focus on the two women; for their up-hill struggles--in a world where Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Jean Genet roamed freely, garnering awards and accolades--are no less than incredible.

Violette soon learns that the 25,000 francs she receives monthly from her publisher is actually from de Beauvoir. Again, this reflects not only de Beauvoir's generosity, but the resistance to Violette's sexually-liberated work in the publishing world at the time. But eventually, through persistence and the slowly evolving recognition of women's rights and equality in France, Violette becomes a celebrated author, embraced by the public and the publishing world. It is sad to think that her popularity isn't that of de Beauvoir (at least here in America) but her writing ultimately proved to be the equal of her more famous contemporaries.

It seems only natural that a film about two women of renown would be carried almost entirely by two women and that they do so effectively makes Violette something other than a just a movie about writers. Leduc and de Beauvoir had much to express and much to overcome. A film depicting their herculean efforts could do no less than make them compelling figures. And it does.