Response to film review link provided here
In the linked review provided here, the reviewer states:
As indicated by the film’s title, here it is Pierre that is overshadowed. Though he remains central, in his grating conduct towards the significantly more appealing Manon and Elisabeth (Lena Paugam), the student with whom he has his affair, Pierre comes off as a self-righteous, insensitive and blindly destructive egotist.
And hopefully the film doesn’t pretend any of this typical, age of misandry, male bashing, simplistic dichotomy of woman=good/man=bad gender feminist nonsense pretends to be “particularly groundbreaking” either, because it most definitely isn’t, more par the course than anything, and at this point it’s getting well moldy. If anything, depicting the female character as being the “self-righteous, insensitive and blindly destructive egoist” would be truly groundbreaking, breaking the now 30-some year long tradition in many movies of man=bad/woman=good. Hell, it might even make female characters more interesting and memorable, instead of the goody-two shoes, always right ones they are often cowardly depicted as being. Apparently though, this flies over the heads of both the director and the reviewer of this movie. I guess that’s ground that’s still waiting to be broken, hopefully sooner than later.
They also write:
One inappropriate aspect of the old days that the film wishes to redress – or at least address – are the sexual politics. In the cinematic tradition referred to with such nostalgia, men are always prioritized.
This is also bullboloney. Any basic knowledge of French New Wave filmmaking would have anyone know that males were not always prioritized, and not just a few exceptions. Perhaps the greatest filmmaker of that era Jean Luc Godard was basically an early male second-wave feminist, and you only have to watch some of his better know movies (Breathless, Masculin Feminin, Week End, etc) to see that he certainly did not “prioritize” males, especially in Week End. The clueless reviewer here is just mindlessly reciting the gender feminist company line, propagandizing history (or should I say herstory?) as one big conspiracy against women by men: utter tosh. Truly ground breaking movies in the future will end this misandric outlook, and movies will not have to be either anti-woman or anti-man.
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