Simone Veil, the trip of the century: immodest and uncomfortable (critic)
After Edith Piaf and Grace Kelly, Olivier Dahan plunges his bombastic production into the life of Simone Veil with a lot of good feelings.
France Télévisions is programming these days special evenings dedicated to the decriminalization of abortion, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Veil Law. It was promulgated precisely on January 17, 1975.
Friday, France 5 broadcast Claude Chabrol’s drama, A women’s affair (1988) with Isabelle Huppert and Marie Trintignant. Tonight, place for the recent biopic of Simone Veil, The Journey of the Centuryon France 2. This film will be followed by the documentary Simone Veil and her sisters, already visible for free on France.TV.
Arriving on the big screen in October 2022, this biopic was a great success in theaters, attracting nearly 2.5 million spectators in theaters. Particularly young spectators, who came with their class or advised by their teachers.
Unfortunately, when it came out, the editorial staff was disappointed by Simone: The Journey of the Century. Here is the review of Firstbefore forming your own opinion this Sunday. Note that one of the interpreters of the former Minister of Health, Elsa Zylberstein, will play another famous SimoneDe Beauvoir, in a new biopic. While awaiting details on this new project, the actress is currently the president of the jury of the Alpe d’Huez 2025 festival.
Alpe d’Huez 2024: we saw L’Amour c’est surcoté and Le Répondeur
A sequence summarizes the company. Simone Veil, then Minister of State, had to go to a hospital in front of television cameras to discuss the ravages of this then shameful disease, AIDS. The cathodic staging provides for the chosen one to leave a room where she was supposed to speak with a patient. Problem, no one planned for a real patient, the one having to stay off-camera. Simone Veil gets angry and immediately asks to see – far from the objectives of course – a dying person. We get busy, we dispatch one. The minister in tears, horrified by the tragedy, can no longer move, leaving the television frame desperately empty. But Olivier Dahan’s omniscient camera can do anything, and shamelessly captures emotion in close-up. All the indecency of the film is there (and we don’t really care if the sequence is based on real events): pompous, immodest and crude staging, excessive valorization of the main character…
Dahan, forever associated with the delirious success of The Kidseems to have become the perfect client to coat hagiographic meringues to order. It seems that the idea of this ” Simone » was whispered to him by Elsa Zylberstein, surely feeling the wind of the Caesars swirling around the corpses thus resurrected. After Grace of Monacoso here is what Simone, the trip of the century which overflows everywhere and which, in wanting to show everything (even the horror of the camps on steady-cam!) shows nothing, except the mask of a woman with an exceptional and thwarted destiny. Simone Veil would have deserved to be considered to her (de)measure: complex and elusive. Let’s move on.