Vivante

Vivante is a French film, about a young, 19 year-old girl, who, on her way back from singing lessons, get's raped by a group of men. She doesn't tell anyone anything about what happened to her, because she thinks she can solve this problem by herself. She get's addicted to drink, drugs and sex with unknown men. She even tries to commit suicide. Only after 8 months she dares to talk to her father and brother about it, and that's when she dares to live again. This movie ain't "the best you've ever seen", it ain't "the first movie about rape". But it shore gives you a moment to think "wtf?". After you've seen this movie, you start to think about the impact of such a thing, and that's, I think, the impact of this movie, it gives you a good look, what's it really like. You hear about rape more often, but thanks to films like this one, you keep remembering that it's not normal. It's not only the story that's great. Also the performance of the 19 year old Vahina Giocante is very good.

I saw this on the EuropaEuropa station, and like a lot of the films on that station it kind of has the feel of a TV movie, but with full-frontal nudity (it's French after all). A young college student with a bright future is brutally raped one night by a stranger. She doesn't tell anybody, but quickly sinks into a self-destructive bout of drinking, drugs, and promiscuous sex. This is kind of realistic I guess--there's a phenomenon where rape victims will often engage in consensual sex right afterwards, which in America anyway is sometimes used against them in court as evidence that they weren't really raped. I suppose women might find this movie pretty empowering.

One thing that bothered me personally though: the lead actress Vahina Giocante (odd name there)really has a great body, and while there is nothing at all erotic about the brutal rape scene, the subsequent sex scenes or the long scenes of her brooding in the bathtub are a different story. I think half the audience (i.e. men) might have a slightly different reaction to this movie than what was perhaps intended. In that respect, this kind of reminded me of two other recent French movies (which I probably also saw on EuropaEuropa), Catherine Breillat's "Romance", which was half tedious feminist diatribe and half really hot sex, and "Bad Company", which was kind of strange combination of an alarmist American TV movie about teenage girls and oral sex mixed with the traditional French penchant for borderline pedophilia. I liked this better than those two, but I can't help thinking that this kind French feminism and softcore sex is sort of at cross-purposes with itself. But then, maybe I'm just unsophisticated American, all the time I spend watching EuropaEuropa notwithstanding.

Seemingly happy 19 year old philosophy student, Claire, is abducted when returning to her dorm and gang raped by four strangers. She cannot tell anyone about it, drops out of school, starts to have impersonal sex with near strangers, and withdraws from her brother and friends. After Marie, (Fanny Cottençon) an older woman acquaintance, picks her up at one of her parking lot f***s, and offers her refuge in her country house, Claire starts to turn her life around enough to get the courage to try suicide. When she is rescued, Claire's brother (Samuel Jouy) gets her out of the hospital, takes her for a child like frolic on the beach and returns to Marie's country house. Interesting study in the deadening of emotion from this trauma and then the slow recovery of self, a bit like "Blue" by Krzysztof Kieslowski. The recovery of Clair's sexual self is portrayed through her hesitant relationship with a photographer colleague (Pierre Cassignard). The hopeful ending comes after Claire starts to reconcile with her father (François Berléand) who withdrew emotionally when she was a child and her mother died. He is the first person she tells of the gang rape, 8 months after it happened. Strong first effort by this director, Sandrine Ray, who focuses on a woman living with the secret of violent abuse. Also effective, if somewhat opaque performance by Vahina Giocante as Claire. All in all this is a thought provoking & sobering film without the gut wrenching impact of "Blue" or "The War Zone" by Tim Roth.