Consent in the cinema: how were the most disturbing scenes filmed?

These are the most striking passages of consent: the way in which the camera does not take its eyes off the most disturbing moments of this story, namely the sex scenes.

These passages were in Vanessa Springora’s shocking book, published in January 2020, which detailed her controlling relationship with Gabriel Matznef when she was just 14 years old. But they left room for imagination, where Vanessa Filo puts them in pictures. Without complacency and without obfuscating the reality described in his film, released in our theaters on October 11.

Vanessa Springora, who was invited to the set of Quotidien on October 3, expressed her doubts when she admitted that if the adaptation of her book were to see the light of day, the violence of images would be stronger than words. The other day, Vanessa Filo discussed with us the approach to this sequence, which was clearly disturbing. And especially the choice of view and the distance at which to place your camera.

“From the moment I wrote the script, there were emotions, feelings, the physical dimension that I wanted to get for the film”The director and screenwriter tells us. “All these sequences were already written, narrated, described through the script. My intention was not to show what happened, but to tell what happened. To tell it through intimate body language.”

“But I didn’t want to show it for the sake of showing it. I really wanted to capture my character’s vulnerability and understand his emotions in real time, everything that underpinned his physical and psychological trajectory. And how he was influenced by this man. So the construction and deconstruction of him will come. “.

“But I have the feeling that by being close to her emotions and feelings, it was my character’s point of view that guided my camera position. I had the feeling that she found her distance and the right place, if she was. Harmony, or rather, with the emotions of my character in the merger”.

Starring Jean-Paul Rouvi and Kim Higuelin, Le Consentement is available in cinemas from October 11.

Commentary collected by Maximilien Pierret in Paris on October 2, 2023