Why you should watch The Laura Stern Affair on France 2 this evening
After its streaming on HBO Max, the series arrives unencrypted. An edifying fiction that confronts the viewer with the daily horror of women victims of violence and the failure of the institution, to the breaking point. A striking work that will not leave you unscathed.
Rarely has a French series dared to go so far into discomfort, capable of confronting reality head-on without smoothing it out, without watering it down, without seeking the alibi of the spectacular. The Laura Stern Affair brutally confronts the viewer with violence against women, when justice hesitates, leaving humans to make their choices.
From the first episode, the shock is violent. Laura Stern, a pharmacist involved in local life, welcomes battered women from her small town to help them talk and protect themselves. But when Audrey is shot down in cold blood in the street by her angry companion, Laura takes the full brunt of the horror of a marital drama. Powerless, she does not give up the fight. On the contrary, she decides to counterattack… in her own way.
By capturing you through the prism of the legal thriller, The Laura Stern Affair will not leave you unscathed. It’s the kind of punchy series that leaves you speechless. KO As we witness the unspeakable daily life of the abused women who pass through the door of this pharmacy, we become aware. The four-episode mini-series advances at the level of a woman, in an emergency, to absolutely denounce. It tells what happens when the warning signs are there, when the threats are known, but the institution slips, procrastinates, lacks resources or reflexes. And she does it without easy heroization, without artificial catharsis, by following an astonishing Valérie Bonneton and placing the viewer in an uncomfortable but necessary position.
What really sets The Laura Stern Affair apart is its moral point of view. The series neither seeks to explain nor excuse, much less theorize. She brings an experience to life: that of a woman confronted with the unbearable, who can no longer sit idly by. Faced with the beatings, the rapes, the influence and the expectation of a predicted tragedy, she can no longer remain a simple spectator. By choosing identification rather than demonstration, fiction forces everyone to ask themselves an intimate and disturbing question: what would we have done in their place? How far can we go when the promised protection does not arrive? And above all, when has society ever failed?
The strength of The Laura Stern Affair also lies in its two-voice writing. That of Frédéric Krivine and Marie Kremer, nourished by personal experiences, field listening and immersion with associations, gives the story a rare density. Nothing is taken from a precise (or real) news item, but everything rings true. The Laura Stern Affair is not a series against men, nor a simplistic manifesto. It is a work which seeks debate, which frees speech and which makes fiction a political space in the noble sense.
The Laura Stern Affair, mini-series in four episodes, to watch on HBO Max and on France Télévisions.
