[CINÉMA] Oxana, a hagiographic portrait of the founder of Femen …

They had fallen into oblivion in recent years, and, let’s face it, they had not missed more than that … Femen are entitled, today, to a film on the genesis of their movement, one of the “Most important in the XXI^e century “according to the official synopsis – we laugh …

Directed by Charlène Favier, director of Slalom, Oxana Particularly focuses on the militant-and atypical journey, let us recognize it-of the organization’s leader, Oksana Chatchko, from her beginnings in Ukraine to her suicide in Paris, in 2018.

A representative of anarcho-feminism…

The story shows us how this young artist, daughter of former Ukrainian workers, graduated in 2000 from the Nikosh school, where she learned to paint orthodox icons, gradually abandoned religion and passed to political activism. Passed, for a time, by communist activism, Oksana Chatchko really found her way in feminism. First with the new ethics group, which in 2008 demonstrated against the scandal of the Khmelnytskyi hospital, where four women died for lack of care, then with the creation of Femen, the same year, alongside her friends Anna Hutsol and Oleksandra Chevchenko. Wind standing against the corruption of the Ukrainian elites, deemed accomplices of prostitution and sex tourism, the femen (contraction of the feminine and the masculine) immediately imposed their trademark: nudity, painting on the body, crowns of flowers and slogans shocking in English … Quick Putin, which they openly accuse of electoral special effects. Refugee in Paris in 2013, as a security measure, the leader of the Femen noticed that the French branch of the movement, directed with an iron fist by her friend Inna Chevtchenko, was the subject of an authoritarian, almost military drift, in total contradiction with the principle of democratic collegiality of the beginnings. This is where the founder of the Femen took her distance from the movement …

Ideological inconsistencies

Built in a very muddled way on two unnecessarily intertwined temporalities – the Ukrainian period and the Parisian period -, Charlène Favier’s film is above all unable to take the slightest critical look on her subject. The director never questions the fundamental inconsistencies of a feminist movement which systematically uses the codes of capitalist society – culture of nudity, easy provocative, buzz, trash and clash – to deplore the moral and intellectual discrediting of women, their basting and their commodification.

Movement in which frenzied anticlericalism, by detecting everything, goes precisely in the sense of this reification of beings … Oddly, the filmmaker does not evoke the cross cuts which the Femen made, probably out of concern to smooth their image with the general public. For her part, Oksana Chatchko, which Charlène Favier seems to admire, was not the last to abuse religion, she exhibited in Paris in branch galleries her icons representing Jesus in sexual positions and the saints with Kalashnikovs. What to delight the Parisian little left-in-law of the left in search of deconstruction. Perhaps we hold there, in this mismanagement and this intellectual confusion, the deep reasons for the suicide of the young woman …

2 out of 5 stars