Violated

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

RAPE OF LOVE

Directed and Written by Yannick Bel Ion

Early in this well-intended and very earnest movie, the heroine, Nicole (Nathalie Nell), is proceeding peacefully along a country road at twilight. Abruptly she is pushed from her motorbike by one of the occupants of a closed van, abducted to a lonely place and then raped by all four of the men in the truck. This scene is long and harrowing, brutal and humiliating, and feminist Director Bellon does not blink at showing us, in excruciating detail, every moment of Nicole's ordeal. Indeed, one comes to admire the fortitude of Actress Nell in playing a scene that must have been almost as terrible to film as an actual rape would be to endure. Yet the sequence has value, revealing through the action of the rapists rather than through abstract discussion the psychology of this sort of criminal, which centers on the need to victimize and abase. It also reveals, as no other film ever has, the horror visited upon the woman. No one who witnesses this scene will ever be able to dismiss the subject casually.

Unfortunately Bellon vitiates the intensity by allowing the rest of her film to deteriorate into a series of rigid and predictable scenes: the deeply wounded victim refusing at first to bring charges; her boyfriend reacting with outrage but with a lack of true understanding; the community half suspecting that the victim may have done something to provoke the crime; the rapists, when they are finally brought to trial, insisting that they were indeed enticed into their act; the woman, supported only by a friend, forced to relive the most ghastly moments of her life in testimony and in re-enactment of the crime.

Bellon even runs in a number of scenes in which traditional female stereotyping is imposed on young girls. One is put down for wanting to be a railroad engineer when she grows up, another not permitted to be a bank robber in a cops-and-robbers game, but told by the little boys that she must be the teller-victim. Children's drawings show women as housewives, while men are portrayed as the movers and shakers of the world.

Despite a delicate performance throughout by Nell, despite the fine quality of Bellon's work at the technical level, the film is finally smothered under the weight of these feminist bromides. One leaves wondering if, in fact, there is any thing original or illuminating left to say about the causes and consequences of rape, whether it is now possible to go be yond talk-show rhetoric. It seems ironic that all one can honestly praise in this movie is its powerful depiction of the crime itself rather than its insights into a world where rape is a tragic commonplace.

Richard Schickel

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