“Diamant Brut”: another portrait of a young girl, French this one, that of Liane, an aspiring teenage influencer in the poor South. A film which annoyed me a lot, and which reminded me of an expression I read a few years ago in an online magazine, the “bourgeois gaze”, which I would not consider as a concept, but which I find enlightening in the occurrence of this way that a certain cinema has of looking at characters from disadvantaged backgrounds.
it takes place in Fréjus, on this not glamorous French Riviera, filmed like America white trash in American independent cinema. Liane lives in a suburb that she reaches by crossing semi-abandoned areas, with her mother and her little sister, in conditions of absolute precariousness. Every day in her room she spends hours doing her makeup, getting dressed, doing her hair, using equipment that is generally stolen to make short videos for social networks. The holy grail, which she constantly discusses with her group of friends, is reaching television and then becoming a famous influencer, and giving herself the life she dreams of. One day, a reality TV producer calls her to give her a casting call – from then on Liane is completely focused on this goal.
The film opens in a parking lot at night, with a young girl awkwardly attempting a trick. pole dance around a post much too big to be practiced in this way, we see her long hair, glitter that shines and everything is already there: the intention to magnify with the means of auteur cinema a figure who is not. in reality. This is where the bourgeois gaze comes in, this bourgeois gaze, as we say the “male gaze” to speak of this famous heteronormative male gaze which would govern the majority of cinematographic production. It’s a totally overlooking look – I know it’s one of my current obsessions – which is exerted on this young woman, played by an actress from a wild casting, and who we imagine was chosen because she had things in common with her character. I find that we look less at her, than we watch the director look at her, with a slightly suspicious fascination, a fascination which far exceeds the story: what we are looking at is not really an environment , or a person, what we are looking at is a voyeuristic process, which consists of complacently scrutinizing a popular figure that we find fascinating.
The goal
The intention of the film is to give thanks to Liane – I choose this word deliberately, because the film deploys a particularly unpleasant kind of mystical subtext. It is therefore a matter of sublimating it by enclosing it in a four-thirds format, this square format which has become a ready-made sign of auteur cinema since the New Wave, by modifying the image with very sophisticated colorimetry processes. which de-realize bodies and places, by placing particularly grandiloquent cello tunes on images where we can read the comments, often insulting, very sexual in any case, left by Liane’s fans. “harsh and delicate” I quote the director who delivers a recipe for “tonality” and that says everything while saying nothing: a sort of neutralization by cinema of a social reality that we would nevertheless like to comment on and denounce.
To do this, the fiction relies on a particularly crude structure: showing that there would be a real Liane, the one both strong and fragile who yells at her mother and timidly refuses a lover, and then the other, the one who imitates Kardashian and others on social networks; The whore, and the virgin basically. Quite frankly it doesn’t go much further than that.
Ultimately what the film produces is exactly what it denounces, exactly what reality TV does: it transforms his character into an icon, that is to say, into a fixed object, of which he is the first fan , but a fan – like on social networks – exhausting, potentially harassing, who pushes you to always give more of yourself. “Rough diamond”: the title was ironic and committed, it was the expression used by this cynical heartless TV producer, but it ultimately literally sounds like the spoils of a filmmaker proud of having found beauty in insignificant, and which to do so cuts brutally into the mass.
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