“He attracts them with his reputation”: consent, 33 years later, this archive at the heart of the film is still as terrifying.

In 1990, the famous literary program Apostrophes, presented by Bernard Pivot, invited the novelist Gabriel Matznef. This archival moment, the only one featured in the feature film Le Consentement, currently in theaters, is fascinating and chilling. It is one of the strongest sequences in the film, based on the story by director Vanessa Filo, with Jean-Paul Ruves explaining that he was inspired by the famous psychopath for the role.

We invite you to familiarize yourself with this excerpt from the show in which Gabriel Matznef was interviewed by Bernard Pivot. She very quickly discovers the words of Genevieve Bombardier, a Quebec writer now dead and the only woman in the group who dares to contradict them. “Mr. Matsnefi seems shameful to me“and adds, “Literature cannot be an alibi“Then, even more directly: “We know that old gentlemen lure small children with candy, he attracts them with his reputation“.

A sequence that looks amazing today, which Vanessa Philo partially preserved in her film Consent. The images have been restored, only the voice of Gabriel Matznef has been replaced by that of Jean-Paul Rouve to fit the rest of the film. But the words remained intact.

“It was important to me that this apostrophe sequence was therehe explains in our podcast interview. I wanted to pay tribute to this woman who was the only one who was against it and spoke out. You should at least know that the public lynched him after his intervention on television. He was called Sluku, a bad devil. It was a trauma for him. But it’s true that we’re in the 80s at that point in the movie. It starts in 1985 and then we follow Vanessa on her journey to the early 1990s and this very show.“

and added: “At that time, society and television gave pride of place to a person who actually supported pedophilia. When we think about it today, we say thankfully that it will never happen again. It’s not all that far. Things haven’t changed yet.”

There was a complacency in the literary and intellectual world that threatened many people

“When we look at the statistics today, the sexual violence that goes on, the abuse of power, whatever it is, the number of femicides, the number of incests that are reported, society is still dysfunctional.. It is clear that there was a complacency in the literary and intellectual world at the time that endangered many people.. I think of all the victims who watched this show and said to themselves: if no one is shocked by this, then everything is normal. But I also think of other potential predators who said to themselves: since we invite Gabriel Matznef to a show like Apostrophes, and there is no problem with acting with impunity, then I can act accordingly… this was ours. Society, in France, that made it possible at that time.”

Consent, currently in theaters, is an adaptation of Vanessa Springora’s bestselling story centered on her controlling relationship with writer Gabriel Matznef.