“Birds of the evening and the morning, I am deaf; come and die on my
back.”
Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit (1970)
To prepare this season of the Film Qlub, we began by selecting the
films, and then we went to the sources they had been adapted from. This brought
a few surprises. To read Violette Leduc for the first time was a shock. What an
exquisite writer –and why hadn’t we read her before? She takes life in her cupped
hands, without spilling a drop. By the second page of Mad in Pursuit, the third volume of her autobiography, you know
that Leduc may be a quavering insect in her daily interactions, but with a pen
in her hand she is a colossus, invincible and immortal.
In
addition to an x-ray-precision self-portrait, Mad in Pursuit includes a number of off-guard sketches of key 20th
century writers and artists such as Jean Genet, Jean Cocteau, or Natalie
Sarraute. The film (rightly) sidelines them in order to focus, like the text
had done, on Violette’s relationship with the novelist, philosopher, and
feminist powerhouse Simone de Beauvoir. Leduc’s poetic language can not be
translated into film. That’s why another adaptation of her autobiographical
writings, the lesbian film Therese and
Isabelle (which left our seasoned Qlubbers blushing when we screened it in
2013), incorporated long direct quotes from the original book. Director and
scriptwriter Martin Provost’s biopic Violette, humbly bows to literature by
dividing the story into ‘chapters’. But his film can give us things the book
can not: the opportunity to see these people made flesh by outstanding actors,
those carefully composed images of stretching and contracting spaces, and a priceless
sketch of a different Simone de Beauvoir. In the film, we see de Beauvoir not
as her devoted Violette saw her –glowing in the perfection of her intellectual
rigour, her hermit’s generosity, and her miraculous tower of rolled-up hair--,
but as a sometimes emotionally frail, and sometimes lonely woman.
