Consent: the shocking book by Vanessa Springora adapted to the cinema (photos)
With the unexpected Jean-Paul Rouve in the role of writer Gabriel Matzneff.
“For so many years, I have been going around in circles in my cage, my dreams have been peopled with murder and revenge. Until the day when the solution finally presents itself, there, before my eyes, as evidence: take the hunter to its own trap, to lock it in a book.” (The consentVanessa Springora, 2020)
These are the words of Vanessa Springora In The consent, chilling autobiographical story published three years ago which recounts the pedophile hold and sexual abuse of the writer Gabriel Matzneff, 50 years old at the time, on the 14-year-old girl she was. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, the testimony had helped to move the lines and free speech.
We have known since the summer of 2020 that the work is being adapted for the screen by the director. vanessa filhowho had directed Marion Cotillard as a resigning mother in her first feature film, Angel Face. The still discreet project materializes with a poster and a disturbing first visual that brings together Jean-Paul Rouvé and the young Kim Higelin, familiar name but new face of the big screen. They will have the heavy task of interpreting the role of the predatory writer and the future novelist, in this drama which will tell the mechanisms of destructive influence which pushed the very young girl to accept the unacceptable.
If the project is still quite discreet, we know that it will take the form of an adaptation faithful to the original story of the writer, as indicated by its synopsis:
“Vanessa Springora tells how she found herself under the influence of a famous writer. In 1986, she was 13; him, almost 50. She explains how she was the victim of a triple predation: sexual, literary and psychic. But beyond her individual story, she also questions the excesses of an era, and the complacency of an environment blinded by talent and celebrity.
In the casting, we will also find Laetitia Casta in the role of the teenager’s mother, but also Elodie Bouchez in the skin of adult Vanessa Springora, during the period of the click which preceded the writing. After I will always see your facesthe actress tackles another poignant and demanding role by appropriating the traits of the writer and woman whose courage she praised, in an interview with Madame Figaro : “It was the first time that I interpreted a contemporary character, and the exercise was a bit dizzying because I wanted to live up to this woman, her word, her path.”
The consent by Vanessa Filho, adapted from the eponymous book by Vanessa Springorawill be released in theaters October 11, 2023.