Everything has been planned so that the viewing goes as smoothly as possible. This morning in January 2023, in Paris, an entire movie theater was reserved for Vanessa Springora. On the screen of Studio 28 is projected The consent (in theaters October 11), adapted from the story of her relationship under the influence with the writer Gabriel Matzneff, when he was 50 and she was just 14, in the mid-1980s. The film crew was absent for let her be calm, without pressure or witnesses. For her part, the author came accompanied by her husband and her best friend. She knows that the intimate scenes will be hard to watch, she wants to feel protected, reassured.
Until halfway through the film, everything is going well. She supports the images of the teenager in the writer’s studio, who boasted of preferring under-16s and Filipino boys. Then comes the moment when the principal asks the young girl to leave the high school of her own free will to take the baccalaureate as a free candidate. This will save him, she explains, from a new disciplinary council due to repeated absences and an expulsion forever recorded in his file. In the room, Vanessa Springora collapses in tears and suddenly finds herself shaking. Until the end of the film, she continues to cry and her leg to shake. The session ends around noon, she takes refuge on the terrace of a café in Abbesses with her loved ones and takes more than an hour before calming down.
Three years after the release of her book, Vanessa Springora, 51, thought she had distanced herself from this period of her life. Published in January 2020, his story, which highlighted sexual violence against minors, was a great success in bookstores with 325,000 copies sold, including paperbacks (according to the analysis firm GFK), and translations in around thirty of country. Above all, the book shook up society and contributed to a change in mentalities, whether people read it or not.
Consent became a common term, other stories followed. That of Camille Kouchner on incest (The great family, Seuil, 2021), that of Hélène Devynck on the women who accuse the presenter Patrick Poivre d’Arvor of sexual violence (Impunity, Seuil, 2022) or this year again the book by Neige Sinno on the incest she suffered as a child (Sad tiger, POL, Le Monde 2023 prize and on the first Goncourt list). In November, actress Ludivine Sagnier performed The consent at the Théâtre de la Ville, in Paris, and begins a tour of France at the beginning of October.
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