“Simone” and “the Harkis”, the silenced – Liberation

The heavy biopic on Simone Veil by Olivier Dahan and the elliptical film on the Algerian harkis by Philippe Faucon, radically opposed in their styles, both seek to confront the dark hours of French history. Attempt at comparative analysis.

Plunging our gaze into what France has least to admit, its dark designs and its dark side, x-raying a certain national indignity from various angles, this is what Olivier Dahan is working on with means and effects that could not be more dissimilar. in his biopic Simone, the trip of the century and Philippe Faucon in the Harkis. Dahan, who had disappeared from the radar for eight years and his film on Grace of Monaco, offers us in the form of a non-chronological kaleidoscope as was already the kid, his successful film on Piaf in 2007, the portrait of a French icon driven by just fights. But from the start, where the film attacks the now legendary debates over the legalization of abortion, the arguments of the deputies – heavily underlined here in their vociferous hatred by close-ups of their mouths puking with retrograde arguments –, make raise the specters of a tenacious collaborative mentality when, for example, an elected UDF accuses the Minister of Health of wanting to throw away embryos…