Women's difficulties in proving certain sexual assaults are not exclusive to Spain. The phenomenon is global and the problem involves very different areas that end up being related: legal, juridical, political, social and even moral. Faced with this, we are observing the consequences in the previous sections every day in the media and on social networks around the world. As far as we are concerned here, cinema is also echoing this in real time and in disparate forms, as art and as a spectacle that accounts for both collective social movements and the individual concerns of human beings.
In recent months there have been many films that have reflected on and shown the effects of the lack of sexual consent and the aspects that each specific act may or may not have. Titles like
How to Have Sex
, Hotel Royal,
Secrets of a Scandal
, You're Not Alone: The Fight Against La Manada
and the recovery of
Not a Pretty Picture,
along with other recent works such as
The Accused
and several such as
Consent
yet to be released,
have developed various aspects of a topic that the French film HLM Pussy,
directed by Nora el Hourch,
approaches from a unique perspective .
This director is a new filmmaker, the daughter of a Moroccan father and a French mother, just like her protagonist, a 15-year-old girl who suffers a non-consensual kiss in a bathroom by a young man of legal age. In her work, Hourch brings something new to the set of films on the subject: braking passes. That is, those circumstances that, in the face of helplessness, fear or the concrete absence of evidence, lead certain women to cross legal lines and become no longer accusers of a crime that can be tried by courts, but people who , due to the measures taken to counteract that previous aggression, they become alleged offenders of a different crime. With all its implications (again, legal, juridical, political, social and moral), and even though they are cases at different levels, the real situation of the Spanish Juana Rivas could serve as context for the case shown in the film. In the film, the recording of a video by the victim's friends of the non-consensual kiss, in an act that the victim provokes so that the aggressor of that incident assaults her again, something that does not happen. .
The girls, despite everything, end up posting the video on social networks and it goes viral, although what the man shows there may not be so much an attack as the clumsy insinuation "of a dick." Therefore, it is difficult to classify as a crime for him, and perhaps for them, for totally different reasons. The case, which fuses the extraordinary adolescent impetus with its inevitable naivety, is tricky, but it is a shame that the daring and originality of the director to propose such a situation are not reciprocated with a development worthy of her proposal, among other things because it takes other paths with less dramatic interest.
Just a few months ago we have also seen in the cinema the painful consequences that a person of good intentions can have when recording an alleged crime in a private place to reliably demonstrate the fact and discover the culprit. Something similar happened
to the noble educator in the German film
Teacher's Room,
of notable depth in many aspects, as to the girls in
HLM Pussy,
titled after the nickname of the social media account that posts the video.
A phrase from one of the girls sums up the situation richly: “We are experiencing a revolution, so taking risks will be inevitable.” In her own way, that of art, Hourch also runs away with them and does not come out completely well, particularly with the ambiguous portrait of the young aggressor. But his film, with relevant nuances around the class conflicts between first and second generation immigrants (some feel their origins; others just try not to be noticed), has the value of contributing shades of gray to a necessary revolution: the fight against sexual violence.
HLM Pussy
Address
: Nora el Hourch.
Performers
: Leah Aubert, Bérénice Bejo, Salma Takaline, Mounir Margoum.
Genre
: drama. France, 2023.
Duration
: 101 minutes.
Premiere: April 12.
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