About the dangers of gaslighting for a gaslighter – Weekend
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The psychological thriller Just You and Me by Frenchwoman Valerie Donzelli is released, in which a toxic man mocks his wife, and she does not tell anyone about it.
Lovely, wonderful family: Blanche is a literature teacher, Greg is a financier, or something like that. They have two children and their own house in Metz – a province, but beautiful forests. With Greg, Blanche worked out right away, they are very happy, Greg is so attentive, he is so good in bed, he cannot live without her. Mom and twin sister love Blanche very much, although they live far away, in Normandy, Blanche is still sad that she had to move from there. But she just tells all this to some middle-aged strict woman – a psychotherapist? There seems to be something wrong with her beautiful, beautiful family after all.
All wrong. Blanche almost does not communicate with anyone, she is forced to account for all her expenses, she has no right to stay at work. Greg reads her letters, suspects her of cheating, sniffs her when she gets home. When some of Greg’s lies come up, Blanche is to blame: he lied because he wanted to make her happy. When Greg loosens his hands a little, it’s Blanche’s fault again: she finished it. Between this “brought” and “I want to make you happy” she throws the whole film. She doesn’t resist.
Is it possible to call a film feminist, where the heroine is dragged along the plot, like a sack full of French literature? Is it possible to call the gaze of a hunted animal a woman’s gaze?
Frenchwoman Valerie Donzelli wanted, by her own admission, to explore the nature of self-deception. How does a literature teacher fall into the trap of a stifler? Why does she trust some rogue who very quickly begins to impose conditions on her and control her movements?
Yes, in retelling it is a bit like “The Irony of Fate”. Fifteen years ago, Donzelli would have taken something like that – cheerful, deceptively sweet, cheerful; there everyone would have fun running around, selflessly fainting, loving and hating each other with all possible dedication. In her feature debut The Queen of the Fools (2009), Donzelli laughed at a woman and her men, in her most successful film, an autobiographical drama about a sick child (I Declare War, 2011), she laughed at herself, at the disease, at the world. Now she is infinitely serious. She believes that she was not ready to film the French bestseller Eric Reinhard in 2014, but now she has grown up to him.
In one episode, in the midst of the most violent fit of rage, Greg suddenly turns to the dressing table to admire the distorted faces of three angry Gregs. A beautiful way to show narcissistic obsession – but, firstly, daffodils are arranged a little differently, and secondly, the film itself also has this habit of admiring itself at the most unexpected moments.
Donzelli plays with light, with close-ups, with music (oh, with music all the time), with sound and silence, she uses filters, special lenses, mirrors, and all this does not turn into an “author’s cinema”, as Donzelli obviously does. wanted, to French cinema in a vacuum, a film about love that says hello to other French films about love – here is a tribute to Eric Rohmer, there is a memory of Desplechin, and here is a direct quote from Jacques Demy. Yes, at the 20th minute, the characters suddenly sing in the car instead of talking, and this is perhaps the most terrible moment of the film – but, fortunately, the song ends quickly, other methods of psychological violence begin.
The actors are working at full strength – Donzelli, in collaboration with Audrey Divan, wrote the script specifically for Virginie Efira. Efira plays the twins, Blanche and Rose, White and Rose, and at the beginning of the film it seems that these are completely different actresses. Greg is played by Melville Poupo, the star of François Ozon’s films, who starred in Woody Allen, the Wachowskis, and Raul Ruiz. The French remember him as a child – for his first role in “The Lover” by Jean-Jacques Annaud. “We all grew up with him in French cinema,” says Donzelli, probably meaning that the cute young man we knew as a child does not look like a monster at all, and his toxicity will come as a complete surprise to viewers. But Greg scares from the very first frames.
The film turned out not about how a beautiful woman drowns in the stuffy arms of an abuser, how she becomes nervous, exhausted, shy. In fact, Donzelli shows how an abusive man is destroyed by his love. The handsome prince at the beginning of the film, towards the end, Melville Pupo does not at all resemble the hero of the airy, light “Summer Tale” by Eric Rohmer. Rather, he is a clone of Anthony Perkins in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Perhaps this was done on purpose.
Male critics think Just You and Me is a feminine take on the abuser. But if Cukor’s Gaslight, the film that gave rise to the term gaslighting, explained to women that they are not always to blame for everything, Reuben’s In Bed with the Enemy urged women to more carefully prepare for escaping from the family, then “Only you and me” tries to warn men that the stronger their possessive instinct, the more nerves they spend and the worse they look. “Who is this goner?” – a casual acquaintance of Blanche is interested closer to the finale. “This goner is my husband,” Blanche replies.
Donzelli’s main conclusion: we must stop making excuses, stop feeling guilty and turn to the law. It doesn’t matter how the teacher ended up in the monster’s arms, what matters is whether she finds herself a good lawyer. The film is arranged in such a way that everything about the lawyer is obvious almost immediately. Therefore, the only question that arises in the viewer throughout the film: did she kill her husband or not? That is, he brought her or she still wants to make him happy?
In theaters from 24 August
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