In the memoir Minor Characters, editor and writer Joyce Johnson describes the early Beat scene in 1950s New York, when she dated Jack Kerouac. Although she and the other women on the scene are frustrated with being the “minor characters” of the title, Johnson mentions one woman, a painter, married to one of the men in the Beat social circle as being the only woman artist she knew (including Johnson herself) who took her work as seriously as a man would. Although we see plenty of evidence today of women, including women artists like Kara Walker, having the type of acclaimed careers that were not open to them in the 1950s, we rarely see that reality reflected in films. A film that focuses on an artist and that artist’s work is usually about a man, whether it’s Ed Harris in Pollock or Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, and he usually has a supportive, encouraging woman by his side who is the main guy’s champion and cheerleader, the filmmakers not seeming to give a shit that she was an accomplished artist as well: painter Lee Krasner (played by Marcia Gay Harden) in Pollock and author Harper Lee (played by Catherine Keener) in Capote.
So Violette, a film which covers all of the 1950s (it begins in the 40s, before the end of the Nazi occupation of France during World War II and ends in 1964) is a nice change in that it focuses on not one, but two women writers who work hard over a period of years to become successful artists (both critically and financially) in their own right. The two characters come from real life: Violette Leduc (played by Emannuelle Devos, whom some will recognize as the star of Arnaud Desplechin’s films like Kings and Queen) the author of La Bâtarde (The Bastard) and Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain) who wrote (among many other books) the groundbreaking feminist work The Second Sex. In a Parisian parallel to Johnson, de Beauvoir was also the companion to Existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre.
Reviews of the film led me to believe it was a portrait of a woman who is a pathetic pain in the ass who also just happens to become an acclaimed writer, but the film is more complex than the tired trope of the woman whose career is more successful than her personal life. For one thing, Leduc’s career, for much of the movie, goes nowhere. After approaching de Beauvoir as a fan and handing her the manuscript she’s been working on, Leduc’s first book comes out in a limited edition, which means no one can find it in the bookstores, so it makes hardly any money. Her next few books barely sell more. A later novel is censored; after de Beauvoir lobbies the publisher, he agrees, as a compromise, to keep the part of Leduc’s novel that describes an abortion (based on an abortion Leduc herself had when she was briefly married) but excises the passages about a sexual relationship between two schoolgirls (also based on Leduc’s early life, which was later published as Thérèse and Isabelle).
De Beauvoir’s advice to Leduc, whether she takes a brief time away from entertaining guests at her apartment or joins Leduc for dinner at a bar is always the same: “Tell it all…You’ll be doing women a favor,” even as Violette acts out every “oversensitive” artist’s worst impulses, always assuming everyone is slighting her (while ignoring all protestations and gestures to the contrary), moaning that no one really cares about her and writing about herself that “Ugliness in a woman is a mortal sin.”
Male critics have, in the context of the film, commented on Devos’ “striking, broad features,” but I wish everyone, especially men, would agree to some sort of moratorium on discussing an actress’s attractiveness. Because no one asks, “Brendan Gleeson: hot or not?” With her hourglass figure (few women look better in a plain white slip), and Betty Grable hair, Devos, as Leduc, is as attractive, and, with her 40s-style high heels, royal blue coat, and matching scarf, as glamorous, as she was as the love-object who should’ve been charged with manslaughter in Kings and Queen. Photos of the younger real-life Leduc show she was not “ugly” either: labeling herself that way was just another instance of her periodic self-loathing. We’re so used to seeing in films beautiful actresses with messy hair or toned-down makeup pretending they don’t still look great, the movie was half over before I realized that the filmmakers (director Martin Provost wrote the script with Marc Abdelnour and René de Ceccatty) didn’t buy into Leduc’s description of herself either.
As happens with a lot of temperamental people, whether they are artists or not, Leduc’s emotional outbursts, though they are rooted in her own despair, end up working to her advantage. After Violette has a fit about being cast as the mother in his amateur film, a rich “collector” friend offers her a generous advance for her next manuscript. After she rants about not being able to support herself with her writing, de Beauvoir arranges for her to receive a stipend while she works.
Leduc falls in the same sort of obsessive, unrequited, desperate love with de Beauvoir that we see her demonstrate for her gay male companion at the beginning of the film (she’s attracted to his queerness, but he remains unmoved by hers). We get a reference to the novel de Beauvoir wrote about a ménage à trois of two women with a man, but while the film name-checks her male lovers, Sartre and American novelist Nelson Algren, nothing else in the film informs us that the bisexual de Beauvoir also had sex with women–though she never has an affair with Leduc, and keeps her at a chilly arms-length for much of the film. But saying the two women don’t have a relationship is wrong.
From their very first, brisk, business-like meeting about the manuscript Leduc has handed to de Beauvoir, de Beauvoir never ceases to encourage Leduc in her writing, suggesting improvements (like cutting out the character based on the gay guy Leduc was obsessed with) and encouraging her to explore themes taken from her own life in her next work. De Beauvoir, while not maternal with Leduc (like Leduc, de Beauvoir is not eager to play “the mother”) is the ideal mentor, perhaps because as one of the only women in her social circle of post-war writers and intellectuals, she was tired of being “one of the boys.” De Beauvoir is Leduc’s champion with publishers and is not above using her own fame to prop up Leduc’s. And she is, in her way, always on Leduc’s side. During a very bad period in Leduc’s life, de Beauvoir appears at her bedside, holding up a newspaper with a laudatory review of Leduc’s latest novel for her to see. De Beauvoir even, at one point, suggests to Leduc that she travel, which, in a roundabout way, leads to the peace Leduc finds at the end of the film. Throughout the decades de Beauvoir tells a disbelieving, depressed Leduc, “Screaming and sobbing will get you nowhere. Writing will.” By the end of the film not only do we see de Beauvoir was right, but more importantly, we see that Violette knows it too.
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzhp2PCOWfI”]
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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.
Hmmm, sounds like a very interesting film. And two very fascinating women in real life!
Although I must say that the gay male character who is “unmoved” by Leduc’s advances would also be completely awesome if the genders were switched for whatever queer movie was out there. I mean, you actually do see it happen often in films/tv where the gay female will be unmoved or not interested in the man interested in her. But it would make it all the more great if they showed that more in the media, so that queer women can continue to be taken seriously…..