A press article, a viral tweet: five years ago, it was the #MeToo explosion. On October 5, 2017, the New York Times publishes an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment against hitherto untouchable Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. The floodgates of the #MeToo movement have just opened. The story has especially retained the name of a man, Ronan Farrow, the journalist behind the New Yorker investigation published on October 10, in which the Italian actress Asia Argento and two other women claimed to have been raped by the co-founder of the Miramax studio. But it was two women, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who were the first to reveal what was known to many in the film world, but was the subject of omerta: Harvey Weinstein offered to help the careers of women against sexual favors and used his power to silence them. The two journalists worked for months on the subject, deploying treasures of patience and benevolence to convince actresses and former collaborators of the producer to speak. They recounted these years of investigation in She Said, a work on the border of thriller and journalistic investigation which reports on the Herculean work accomplished, brought to the screen by the German Maria Schrader, in theaters now .October 15, 2017, a tweet from actress Alyssa Milano will end up lighting the fuse on social networks. What follows is a deluge of testimonies on sexual harassment in the workplace – and beyond – of women in film, media, music, cooking, theatre, start-ups, video games, YouTube or Sport. The hashtag #MeToo was used more than 19 million times on Twitter in the year following Milano’s tweet. See also on Konbini Hardly any professional sector will be spared. naturally — then from the media, that sexual harassment was first, then most widely, denounced. This is how the 7th art recently took up the question to try to do its introspection. And today, reality meets fiction. Tried in February 2020 in New York, Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison for sexual assault and rape. In 2021, a second trial opened in Los Angeles where the fallen producer appeared on eleven new charges and the jurors were notably ordered not to watch the trailer for She Said. Cinema and #MeToo are now intimately linked. She Said was announced as the first film to bring the catalyst for the #MeToo movement to the screen by openly quoting Weinstein’s name. But it’s actually a film about the real victims of the producer. Some are present only by name, embodied by actresses, while others, such as actress and feminist figure Ashley Judd who was one of the first to break the omerta around Harvey Weinstein, embodies her own role and brings a historical consistency to the film. Its director herself also refuses to qualify She Said as a film on the Weinstein affair, or even a film on the #MeToo movement. For her, it was a question of bringing to the screen the impressive investigative work of the two journalists Twohey and Kantor – whose names have not yet marked history – and summarized from the title of the film, at the double mention. “She Said” translates both an assumed voice but also a doubt as to the veracity of the testimony. This is the whole point of their work and therefore of the film: trying to convince terrified victims to speak. The feature film is not a feminist standard bearer but chooses to celebrate the rigor of journalistic work that has changed the world and ends with a simple shot of a newspaper proofreader clicking on the “publish” button after a final rereading of the paper. If She Said is indeed the first feature film to openly mention the name of Harvey Weinstein, the latter is permanently rejected off-screen to leave all the room for his victims, and those who try to convince them to talk, to put them back at the center of this story that is theirs. We hear the producer threatening the journalists on the phone and we see his disturbing silhouette in a meeting room, but this is the only place the director has chosen to leave to the aggressor in his story. As mentioned from the title, he is t is about a film about speech which therefore does not choose the camp of demonstration. Some assaults are recounted in flashbacks – which we would have done without cinematographically – but which are filmed with real awareness. If we hear the stories of the victims, we never see the attacks on the screen, only empty hotel rooms haunted by the sordid presence of the producer or the women who support and console each other. -taken opposite that Jay Roach, the director of Bombshell, released in 2019, unfortunately chose, which also staged a true story, that of the Fox News scandal and the fall of Roger Ailes, its CEO and sexual predator in 2017, initiated by presenter Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman), star journalist Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) and a fictional recruit (Margot Robbie). is the first sexual violence film of the post #MeToo era. In a cartridge in the introduction of the film, it is mentioned here that all the characters of the film are inspired by the protagonists of the affair and interpreted by actors and actresses but made up and even prosthesed to resemble the journalists of Fox News as closely as possible. Where She Said filmed the very unglamorous backstage of a journalistic investigation in a gray and unwelcoming New York, Bombshell chose to call on the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood to play the victims of Roger Ailes. Bombshell in no way reflects the complexity of systemic sexual harassment in the workplace. The emphasis here is not on the difficulty of speaking but rather on the dissonance between the very conservative political opinions of the channel’s employees and their feminist struggle. The writing of the fictional character of Kayla Pospisil, interpreted by Margot Robbie, is also ambiguous and the ambitious but exaggeratedly naive character of the young woman gives the viewer the unpleasant feeling that she is being punished for these same reasons. in its staging that Bombshell fails. The film opens with a monologue by Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly addressed to the camera which summarizes, with surprising detachment, the ins and outs of the scandal. A very lazy scriptwriting process but above all a very clumsy introduction given the seriousness of the facts exposed. In addition to real testimonies from former employees who were victims of Roger Ailes’ abuse inserted into an inmemoriam-style sequence, certain attacks are also recounted in flashbacks . But unlike She Said, Jay Roach chose to film the aggressor – excessively dripping and disgusting – and his actions but above all, to adopt his point of view. In the central scene of the film where Kayla Pospisil undergoes the assaults of her CEO, the camera films this naked body that the attacker forces to reveal herself to go up to her panties, filmed in a fixed shot in a long and regrettable demonstration of male gaze.Bombshell also tries to evoke the ambivalence of some of the protagonists, their silence and therefore their complicity without succeeding in convincing. It is the series The Morning Show which remains the most exemplary demonstration of the complexity of sexual harassment in spaces of hierarchy such as the company. Or moving away from reality Multiple post #MeToo series have chosen to adopt a more committed and feminist but rarer are those to have designed their plots entirely on the phenomenon as did The Morning Show. If we find actors common to Bombshell, in particular Mark Duplass, here a producer under pressure, or Holland Taylor as a channel boss, the comparison stops here. The Apple TV + series begins when Mitch Kessler (Steve Carrel) , co-host of America’s most-watched morning show, is suspended on charges of inappropriate sexual behavior. It is now a question of understanding how he was able to enjoy such impunity until then and how to ensure the future of the show. Immediately, the spotlight of the country and fiction is therefore trained on Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston), her co-presenter, to question the impact of these revelations on her professional and personal life. Without giving in to the sexist bias which consists in demanding women around the aggressor that they justify acts they did not commit, the series explores the famous “grey zone” and the notion of active or passive complicity through the colleague and friend of the sexual predator, who worked alongside him for 15 years, loved him like a friend and was therefore sometimes the privileged witness of his actions. Here the aggressor is not an old, unpleasant and paunchy man, he is an attractive, sympathetic, joking man and embodied by the most affable actor in show business. Other episodes choose to decenter Alex Levy to focus on the shadow women at the helm of the show, all linked to the fallen presenter. Some have consented to sexual relations with him, others are his victims and the complex and tragic narrative arc around one of them, Hannah Shoenfeld, confronted with collusion at all levels of the hierarchy. , is edifying. The secondary actors also add their stone to the building of this very rich post #MeToo reflection, in particular the secret romance between two colleagues of different ages and hierarchical positions, who question their relationship following these revelations. The Morning Show, an addictive series on the media gear after #MeTooIs it therefore through fiction that we are most accurately aiming? In 2019, three years after the birth of the #MeToo movement, it was Kitty Green’s feature film, The Assistant, which took the most radical stance in understanding how victims and witnesses are silenced. Based on the testimony of Weinstein’s former assistant, the film immersed us in the anxiety-provoking daily life of Jane, an aspiring film producer but for the time being a simple assistant, first arrival last departure, who will discover the secret actions of her boss and the mysterious appointments he gives in hotels to young and pretty candidates. Almost behind closed doors in this hushed universe in pastel colors, an anxiety-provoking thriller is played out, carried by a mute heroine who shines with her idea of staging. Inhabited by the need to film sexual harassment with awareness, the director has chosen to reduce this abusive and sexual predatory boss to a simple phantom presence and to focus solely on the evolution and the ethical tensions of her heroine, ambitious but conscious. If he is omnipresent in Jane’s nightmarish daily life, the producer only exists through incendiary emails, angry phone calls, slammed doors and a gloomy office that she must clean after his abuse. Where Bombshell portrayed the stalker as a vicious, vociferous old man, The Assistant amplifies the magnitude of his unhealthy presence, power and abuse. accusations continue to rain down, the seventh art will continue to seize on these cases by decentering, we hope, the stories of their names and their violence to steal the limelight from them that they have had too much.
