‘Mais qui va garder les enfants?' Postfeminist retraditionalism in Sylvie Testud’s<i>La Vie d’une autre</i>(2012)

Rodgers, Julie

doi:10.1080/09639489.2021.1936473

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 13 publications

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“…13 Among several French films of the 2010s openly promoting the abandonment of high-status female professionalism, the star-studded romance La Vie d'une autre (2012) is 'archetypally representative of this retraditionalist paradigm'. 14 In it, Juliette Binoche plays a woman who undergoes a brain trauma in her sleep, provoking amnesia about the last fifteen years of her life, and discovers to her dismay that she has become a career-obsessed global businesswoman who neglects her son and whose marriage to a cartoonist (Mathieu Kassovitz) is on the rocks. She is prompted to make new lifestyle choices and renew bonds with both family members, in a literal turn back to an earlier version of womanhood defined through emotional connection and care ethics.…”

Section: What a Fille Wants?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Nostalgia, Melancholy, Trauma: Backlash Postfeminism in Contemporary French Screen Romance

Harrod¹

2022

Nottingham French Studies

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This article draws on Diane Negra’s (2009) assessment of neo-global postfeminist popular culture and cinema as displaying an obsession with time-control that is largely inimical to feminist progress, arguing that similar currents are visible in 2010s French screen romances. While manifestations of this obsession with relevance for the contemporary French context range from celebrations of ritualized, time-sensitive milestones (marriage, pregnancy) to narratives of female professional retreatism in the face of ‘time-poverty’ or the expansion of sexualized female identities across ages, this article focuses in depth on themes of actual or symbolic historical reversion in the intimate sphere through a close analysis of the films Camille redouble (Noémie Lvovsky, 2012) and Un peu, beaucoup, aveuglément (Clovis Cornillac, 2015). After surveying other cognate fictions, the discussion demonstrates that both these films reflect a wider backdrop of time-related trauma informing contemporary French onscreen romance and are accordingly melancholic, as well as openly nostalgic, in theme and tone. The article interrogates the backlash aspects of such narratives but also the different resonances associated with regressive ‘postfeminist’ elements in French as opposed to American culture. It thus demonstrates that postfeminism bears a specific relationship to the distinctive past history comprised by local feminist movements and intersects with other Gallic customs and ideologies – notably nationalistic ones – in particular ways.

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Section: What a Fille Wants?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Nostalgia, Melancholy, Trauma: Backlash Postfeminism in Contemporary French Screen Romance

Harrod¹

2022

Nottingham French Studies

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The ageing, the immature and the ageless: Juliette Binoche’s midlife roles since 2010

Morrey

2024

French Screen Studies

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‘Mais qui va garder les enfants?' Postfeminist retraditionalism in Sylvie Testud’sLa Vie d’une autre(2012)

Cited by 2 publications

References 13 publications

Nostalgia, Melancholy, Trauma: Backlash Postfeminism in Contemporary French Screen Romance

Nostalgia, Melancholy, Trauma: Backlash Postfeminism in Contemporary French Screen Romance

The ageing, the immature and the ageless: Juliette Binoche’s midlife roles since 2010

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