In VIOLETTE, brilliant French actress Emmanuelle Devos portrays writer Violette Leduc.  If Simone de Beauvoir was the Queen of French letters then Violete was the princess, heir apparent to post war Paris literati.

Pic opens with Violette being pursued through a forest with proceeds from a poach in her sack. World War II is in its waning stages and she is shacked up in the country with misogynist hack Maurice Sacks. Violette is needy and clinging, legacy of her illegitimacy and the lack of intimacy displayed by her mother.

That Sacks is a homosexual is no impediment to Violette’s ardour and she subjugates herself to the scribe. Soon, Sacks sacks her by leaving her, but not before stirring a literary ambition that takes her to Paris and mentorship of de Beauvoir, beautifully played by Sandrine Kiberlaine .

In Paris, she becomes the darling of Jean Genet – a bulldog bravura performance by Jacques Bonnaffe – and is published by Albert Camus. She is also reunited with her mother, in a fierce yet fragile co-dependence relationship that borders on sado-masochism.

Director Martin Provost obviously has a penchant to portray the life of artists – a previous picture was the sublime SERAPHINE about the painter Seraphine de Senlis – a penchant that perfectly plays on the screen from script and performance through framing and production design.