‘Consent’: a good portrait of social pedophilia that errs in the representation of sex | Culture

It is not easy to narrate or visualize what happened between the renowned French writer Gabriel Matzneff and the then girl—now a writer and editor—Vanessa Springora since November 1985 and over three years. Matzneff, who was 50 years old when he decided to seduce a 14-year-old girl, with whom he had a relationship basically based on sex, already had extensive pedophile experience. Not only that: he had written it, it had been published and it was celebrated and awarded by broad French literary circles.

“Once you have held in your arms, kissed, caressed, possessed a 13-year-old boy, a 15-year-old girl, everything else seems dull, heavy, insipid,” Matzneff wrote in books like Les moins de seize ans (Those under 16), published in 1974 and, be careful, reissued in 2005. “July 28, 1986. 5:20 p.m. “My sex has triumphed over the hymen of my beautiful 14-year-old lover,” she declaimed in her Diaries. Springora, who took years to understand that this was not love but psychological and sexual abuse, manipulation and rape, responded with the book The consentpublished in 2020. A literary, cultural, social, political and even legal phenomenon, which shocked the country and caused changes in its legislation, and whose film adaptation is now being released in Spain, directed by Vanessa Filho and with Springora herself as co-writer.

In addition to a narrative, dialogues, a portrait of characters, a succession of situations and an interior and exterior path of its creatures, a look, a style is needed to compose a film like this. A way of applying cinematic meaning to what is pure abjection. However, Filho does not have it. It is about using cinematographic language in an honest but clean way; true but considered; evocative of that hell, but never explicit; Let it not be ambiguity that dominates in that view because in this case indeterminacy does not fit; that there is not a single crack so that those sequences, or certain shots, which can only be depraved, have a minimum breath of eroticism.

How long does each shot last, where the camera is placed, how the characters move, what degrees of nudity do the bodies of that 50-year-old man and that girl show… These are decisions to be made and, with all of them, that look is shaped. . And in the sex sequences it contains The consent, at least for the one who writes this, there is neither style nor the necessary modesty. Of course, more would be missing, the Springora interpreter, Kim Higelin, is of legal age: he is 24 years old. Another thing is her appearance.

On the other hand, in a second branch of the film, fundamental in the social aspect, Filho does make some formal and substantive decisions of notable merit. Firstly, with the portrait of Springora’s mother, he chose to consider her daughter an adult who should make her own decisions. So, when he discovers their relationship, he seems to fly into a rage. “He is a pervert, a depraved person. A pedophile. But everyone knows it! However, a friend of the writer, with whom she interacts among the intellectuals of Paris, when the child threatens to leave school if she prevents her from “living her love,” she takes a terrible step aside, while threatening her with going to the police without then doing so: “Do what you want, but then don’t complain.”

The drawing of that mother is brutal, as is that of literary circles, and there a paradigmatic sequence reveals in a documentary way (Filho’s accurate decision)with the complicity of a good part of society: a television program with the writer among his guests, in which the presenter defines him this way, to the laughter of the majority of his fellow members: “If there really is a sex educator, it is Gabriel Matzneff. He likes to seduce, but above all he likes to be the first.”

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