The mixture of genres: a daring (critical) comedy
Michel Leclerc explores gender relationships in the post #MeToo era around a false denunciation of rape? His best film since the names of people.
In a time when we are red in a damage that we can no longer say anything or that the artists self-censorship for fear of a bad buzz, this is a film that contrasts. Because its director, Michel Leclerc, seizes a subject of closing society, Metoo, precisely without finishing, in the footsteps of Simone, a conservative cop who infiltrates in a feminist collective, “the bolds”, suspected of complicity in the murder of a husband violates by his wife. And who, while its members surprise it … leaving her police station, invents, to save her cover, that she came out of a complaint for sexual assault …
There is only blows to take on paper on paper in the idea of making a false testimony on VSS a scriptwriting twist. Except that Leclerc is neither a suicide bomber nor a provocateur. And that he only has to prolong what the heart of his cinema has been The names of people. This way of speaking of commitment by the prism of a playful who dramatizes things without denying them.
Because what this scenario co- signed as always with Baya Kasmi and finely chiseled, is the impact of #MeToo in women as in men. The certainties it has strengthened or swept away. Epidermal reactions and slow fragmentation that he aroused. We thus see Simone gradually adhering to the ideas which seemed radical to her. And Paul, the failed actor that she wrongly accused, the most harmless of men, thrown into public vindictive, ask questions about the attitude he may have had in the past with his conquests.
But in this way of developing these two characters camped brilliantly by Léa Drucker and Benjamin Lavennhe (awarded at the Alpe d’Huez festival) as the band of feminists, there is no moral posture in Leclerc. Humor constitutes his only compass. The one that makes it possible to mock certain flaws without ever damaging the affection for its characters a high aerobatic exercise where the presence of Judith Chemla constitutes a strong symbol in view of what it has gone through in its own life.
The way that lends itself to the game expresses basically all that is The mixture of genres. An uncomfortable but never disturbing film. A way of not reducing an essential question to the cries of goldsmith between progressives and reacts. A film that makes a lot of good.
By Michel Leclerc. With Léa Drucker, Benjamin Lavernhe, Judith Chemla… Duration 2h14. Released April 16, 2025
