Metacritic-Rezensionen

In Martin Provost’s graceful biopic, Emmanuelle Devos plays Leduc as a powder keg of a woman who used her loneliness and insecurity as the explosive fuel for her work.

Provost's film, like its heroine, is full of active, sparking nerves.

[A] handsome, intelligently absorbing and stirring biographical portrait.

It’s a movie about coming to peace with solitude, leagues beyond most biopics.

By focusing on the tumultuous friendship between Violette LeDuc and Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Provost creates not so much a dichotomy of femininity as a funhouse mirror of it.

In Devos’ hard-charging performance, she’s also fascinating, and that’s all a film requires.

“Séraphine” was haunting; Violette, for all its writhings, is familiar.

As presented here, the novelist Violette Leduc is fascinating and strangely lovable, at least as seen from the audience. But actually knowing her? That would have been work.

It’s a brutal argument to make: that the most relevant information to convey about the life of an influential writer is the fact that she struggled early and often. This approach may seem philosophically appropriate for a movie about existentialists, but dramatically, it makes the film a bit of a slog.

A few excerpts of Leduc’s prose spoken in voiceover, expressing the same feelings poetically, can’t compensate for over two hours of maudlin self-pity. It’s so annoying that dull shots of Leduc writing serve as a welcome respite.