La Rochelle Fiction Festival: women in all their complexity

From our special correspondents in La Rochelle,

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Women and children first!

Or rather the teenagers, very represented this year in the fictions - unitary or series -, themselves carried by mothers, as many women, single, wives, fragile, combative, selfish, empathetic, sensual, endearing, "endearing", romantic, nervous, angry, all at the same time... So many aspects of the female figure and so many heroines in which the authors and creators of fiction see an infinity of characters.

believer and lesbian

The observation is not new.

Far from it.

Phèdre, Berenice, Camille Claudel, Cléopâtre, Madame Bovary are some obvious examples.

And what about Diane de Poitiers, whose Isabelle Adjani, under the increasingly questionable direction of Josée Dayan (

), paints a whimsical and hysterical portrait, a futile allegory of vanity - vanitas vanitatum -, an ageless desperate woman and without true depth, pale and distant copied/pasted from Margot by Patrice Chéreau.

She is nonetheless the heroine of the first opus of a new collection from France Télévisions called “Les audacieuses”.

In unison with the portraits of women presented in this festival, from

(Canal+) to the romantic epic in the midst of the Great War

(TF1), via the cruel fable

(Arte), the gastronomic thriller in the kitchens of

(13th street),

(France 2), the black comedy

(M6) or

therapy (TF1).

Even among the firefighters of the ultra-realistic and hermetic

(Netflix), the commitment is written in the feminine through the character of Colonel, believer and lesbian, camped by Caroline Proust who opposes her general (Roschdy Zem) reluctant to risk the lives of his men in the fire.

Read also Acclaimed, French fiction finds itself overheated

Some of these portraits are very beautiful.

Others are a little less so.

These fictions have in common their strength of character and their ability to face this state of loneliness which confronts the whole genre, whatever the trajectories and the happy or unhappy events of life and history.

Maternity, illness, early childhood, abandonment, love, loss of love, sentimental betrayals, old age, deportation, momentum of first emotions, devastation of war, entrepreneurial setback, perinatal bereavement, touching or abuse.

These heroines face everything without looking away, without taboos, without understatement and understatement.

The authors' vision may be raw, but without blinkers for the sake of verisimilitude and absolute resilience.

The descent into hell of a teenager

Toddlers, kids and other young people are housed in the same boat.

The daily life of disability and “validism” are shown as never before in the “teen drama” 

(TF1), immersed in the only school in France which brings together able-bodied and disabled students on an equal basis.

Teenagers and their secrets, their fragility at a pivotal age are also at the heart of the initiatory

(TF1) which timidly handles fantasy against a backdrop of ancient Greek myth.

The thirst for life in defiance of life expectancy in

(M6), moving adaptation of the autobiographical story of a young woman with cystic fibrosis, who fell in love and pregnant at 16 years old.

self-destruction in

(France 2), which tells the descent into hell of a teenager who became addicted to drugs.

Even for coming-of-age comedies, from the pros of the pink minitel in

(OCS) to the galleys of identity and integration

(Amazon Prime Video), reality is a bitch and the future a fight and a constant choice.

And the furrow still needs to be dug.

France Télévisons wants to apply its recipe for daily soap operas to the

chronicle of a school year in agricultural high school.

Imminent filming for a premiere in La Rochelle in 2023?

That we wish as imaginative as the one in the process of ending to spice up and divert the codes of the thriller.