Consent (2023) by Vanessa Filho
- dailyentertainment95
- 20 hours ago
- 13 min read
France / Belgium | 2023 | 119 min | Biographical Drama
A Disturbing True Story of Power, Grooming and Cultural Complicity
➡️ Where to Watch: 🇺🇸 US — JustWatch · 🇨🇦 Canada — JustWatch · 🇫🇷 France — JustWatch
Consent (Le Consentement) adapts Vanessa Springora’s autobiographical book about her relationship as a young teenager with celebrated French writer Gabriel Matzneff, who was around 50. Set primarily in 1980s Paris, the film follows Vanessa as what initially appears to her as intellectual admiration and romance develops into a profoundly unequal and damaging relationship.
Director Vanessa Filho does not frame the story as a provocative forbidden romance. Instead, the film examines grooming, manipulation and an extreme imbalance of power, while also confronting the cultural environment that enabled Matzneff to operate openly within prestigious literary and intellectual circles.
Kim Higelin plays the young Vanessa, Jean-Paul Rouve takes the deliberately unsettling role of Matzneff, and Laetitia Casta plays Vanessa’s mother.
Why This Movie Matters Right Now: France Reexamines Who Culture Once Protected
Consent is larger than the story of one abusive relationship. Its disturbing historical context is the social legitimacy Matzneff enjoyed within sections of the French cultural establishment, despite publicly writing about relationships with minors.
The film therefore asks audiences to look beyond an individual perpetrator toward the environment surrounding him. Literary prestige, celebrity, intellectual status and social acceptance can all help normalize conduct that should instead trigger scrutiny and intervention.
Springora eventually reclaimed control of her story through her memoir, published in France in 2020. Filho’s adaptation extends that testimony into cinema, shifting narrative authority away from the celebrated older writer and toward the young person whose experience had previously existed inside his version of events.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Consent is not simply about one predatory relationship; it confronts the cultural structures that allowed an influential adult to exercise power over a child. The scandal is also about who looked away.
Why Everyone Is Talking About It: A Real French Literary Scandal Becomes Cinema
The true-story foundation gives Consent an impact that a fictional drama could not easily replicate. Vanessa Springora wrote about her own experience with Gabriel Matzneff, making the film an adaptation of testimony rather than a fictionalized provocation.
There is another striking element in the casting. Jean-Paul Rouve, strongly associated with comedy and more sympathetic characters in French cinema, plays dramatically against type as Matzneff. Rather than presenting him as an obvious monster, the performance emphasizes charm, intellectual authority and emotional manipulation—qualities that help explain how predatory power can disguise itself.
Kim Higelin's performance became one of the film's most recognized elements, earning both international festival recognition and attention from the French film industry.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Consent transforms one of France's most disturbing literary scandals into a survivor-centered examination of grooming and institutional complicity. Its true-story origins make the discomfort impossible to dismiss.
Awards & Recognition: Kim Higelin Emerges as the Film’s Breakthrough
Consent received 1 win and 2 nominations, with Kim Higelin attracting the strongest recognition. She won Best Actress at the 2023 Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival for her performance as Vanessa Springora.
The film subsequently received two 2024 César Award nominations: Higelin for Most Promising Actress and Vanessa Filho for Best Adapted Screenplay. The recognition is particularly significant because both nominations center on the difficult task of translating Springora's autobiographical testimony into a dramatic film without losing the victim's perspective.
➡️ Awards: 1 win + 2 César nominations
➡️ Key Takeaway: Kim Higelin's award-winning performance became a major part of Consent's critical identity, while its César screenplay nomination recognized the strength of the adaptation. The survivor's perspective remains at the center.
Box Office & Cultural Impact: A Difficult Story Found an Audience
With an estimated production budget of €3.69 million, Consent earned approximately $4.71 million worldwide according to the figures supplied. For a French-language biographical drama dealing with difficult subject matter, its significance extends beyond conventional commercial performance.
Its larger cultural value comes from transforming Springora's testimony into a widely accessible screen story. The film places viewers inside a period when Matzneff's literary reputation and cultural connections helped create an environment in which deeply harmful behavior could be discussed with disturbing permissiveness.
That historical distance is precisely what gives the movie contemporary relevance: it asks audiences to reconsider how prestige can distort society's willingness to recognize exploitation.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Consent turns an intensely personal testimony into a broader reckoning with fame, cultural authority and institutional silence. Cinema makes the historical complicity visible.
Why Consent Stands Out: The Film Takes Back Control of the Story
The most important aspect of Consent is ultimately who gets to tell the story. Vanessa Springora had once existed inside Matzneff's public narrative as a young muse and lover; her memoir fundamentally reversed that relationship by allowing her to describe what happened from her own perspective.
Filho's film continues that reversal. Rather than asking audiences to be fascinated by the notorious writer, it asks them to understand the mechanisms through which a teenager could be drawn into an unequal relationship and gradually subjected to another person's control.
That makes Consent more than another true-crime-style reconstruction of scandal. It is about narrative ownership—who gets remembered, who gets believed and who finally gets to define what happened.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Consent reclaims a story once shaped by a powerful older man and returns it to the young woman who lived through it. The most important change is who controls the narrative.
Movie Trend: Survivor-Centered True Stories — Exposing Abuse, Grooming and Manipulation
Consent belongs to a growing wave of survivor-centered dramas that revisit abuse through the perspective of the person who experienced it. Vanessa Springora first reclaimed her own story through her autobiographical book; Vanessa Filho's adaptation extends that reclamation to cinema.
The film is particularly interested in grooming and coercive control rather than presenting Vanessa and Gabriel Matzneff as participants in an unconventional romance. Critics repeatedly highlighted how the film exposes the mechanisms through which Matzneff gains and maintains psychological control over the teenager.
This makes the movie part of a broader cultural reassessment of stories that previous generations sometimes framed through the charisma, fame or artistic reputation of powerful men.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Consent represents a shift from telling scandalous stories about famous men to examining what those relationships actually meant for the people subjected to their power. The survivor becomes the storyteller. Perspective changes everything.
➡️ Movie Trend: Survivor-Centered True Stories
Who Should Watch It? (Audience Profile): True Stories, Social Dramas and Challenging French Cinema
Audience Profile | Description |
Core Audience | True-story, biographical and serious drama viewers |
Secondary Audience | French cinema, literary adaptation and socially conscious film audiences |
Age | Adult audiences |
Gender | Broad adult audience |
Lifestyle | Culturally engaged viewers interested in literature, social issues and contemporary debates |
Viewing Behaviour | Audiences drawn to difficult true stories, acclaimed performances and psychologically intense dramas |
Consent is best suited to viewers prepared for an emotionally difficult film rather than conventional entertainment. Contemporary reviews frequently described the experience as disturbing, suffocating or deliberately uncomfortable, while also highlighting the performances of Kim Higelin and Jean-Paul Rouve.
It should particularly interest audiences drawn to films that reconsider historical behavior through contemporary understandings of power and abuse. The literary setting gives the story another dimension, because intellectual prestige itself becomes part of the power structure surrounding Vanessa.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Consent is for viewers interested in challenging true stories where performance, psychology and social context matter more than escapism. It is intentionally uncomfortable. That discomfort has a purpose.
What This Movie Means for the Industry: Survivor Testimony Is Becoming Cultural Reassessment
Consent demonstrates how adaptation can do more than translate a successful book into another medium. Springora's testimony challenged the public narrative surrounding Matzneff; the film allows that perspective to reach an audience that may never encounter the original memoir.
Its French theatrical performance is especially notable. The movie attracted more than 600,000 admissions in France despite its difficult subject, with reporting also identifying TikTok attention as one factor behind its theatrical momentum.
That suggests serious social dramas can generate wider engagement when their subjects connect with contemporary conversations. A film about events in the 1980s can therefore feel strikingly current when audiences recognize the continuing questions surrounding consent, fame and unequal power.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Consent shows that survivor testimony can move from memoir to cinema and reach a substantial mainstream audience. Personal testimony becomes cultural reassessment. Difficult stories can still find viewers.
Viral Success: TikTok Helped a Difficult French Drama Reach Younger Audiences
One of the most unexpected elements of Consent's success was its connection with TikTok. Première reported that the film's French theatrical run surpassed 600,000 admissions and attributed part of that momentum to buzz on the platform.
That is particularly significant for a nearly two-hour French biographical drama dealing with a disturbing historical case. Instead of viral attention being limited to horror, comedy or franchise entertainment, younger audiences helped amplify a serious film centered on grooming and coercive control.
The phenomenon also fits the film thematically. A story originally reclaimed through a literary memoir gained another generation of attention through cinema and then circulated through a platform dominated by younger users.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Consent demonstrates that social-media virality can propel difficult prestige drama as well as conventional entertainment. TikTok helped turn a painful true story into a wider cultural conversation. Younger audiences became part of its second life.
Consumer Appeal: True Crime Curiosity Meets Prestige Drama
Consent occupies an interesting space between biographical drama, literary adaptation and true-story cultural scandal. The real people behind the film naturally create curiosity, but the movie uses that interest to examine manipulation rather than simply reconstruct sensational events.
Jean-Paul Rouve's against-type casting adds another attraction. French audiences accustomed to seeing him in comic and sympathetic roles encounter a deliberately disturbing performance as Matzneff, while Kim Higelin provides the emotional center as Vanessa. Critics were divided over aspects of the adaptation, but both performances became major points of discussion.
The combination of recognizable scandal, difficult subject matter, strong performances and social relevance gives Consent a broader audience proposition than a conventional literary biopic.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Consent attracts audiences through a notorious true story but asks them to engage with something deeper: how manipulation works and how cultural prestige can disguise abuse. The scandal gets attention. Vanessa's perspective gives it meaning.
Creative Analysis: How Grooming and Manipulation Become a System of Control
Consent is most effective when it concentrates on how abuse develops gradually rather than appearing immediately as obvious violence. Vanessa is young, intellectually curious and fascinated by Gabriel Matzneff’s literary reputation; he uses attention, intellectual validation and emotional dependency to establish increasing control over her.
Vanessa Filho deliberately keeps the film close to Vanessa’s adolescent perspective rather than beginning with the judgment of her adult self. The result makes viewers experience the progression from fascination to dependency, confusion and eventual recognition of abuse.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Consent shows grooming as a gradual process in which admiration and affection become tools for manipulation. Control arrives disguised as love. Recognition comes later.
Storytelling: The Film Shows How Manipulation Works Step by Step
The narrative follows Vanessa chronologically, allowing the audience to see how Matzneff’s influence accumulates. Letters, attention, intellectual admiration and emotional pressure gradually create a relationship in which an adult holds overwhelming power over a teenager.
Filho specifically chose not to continually interrupt the adolescent story with an adult Vanessa looking backward. She wanted viewers placed within the immediacy of Vanessa’s emotions, making her eventual awakening more powerful.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Consent does not simply tell audiences that Vanessa was manipulated—it shows how manipulation gradually changes her understanding of the relationship. The process is the story. That makes the abuse more disturbing.
Direction & Tone: Vanessa Filho Refuses to Turn Abuse Into Romance
One of Filho’s most important choices is refusing to romanticize the relationship. Visual techniques including high-contrast imagery and low-angle compositions emphasize the imbalance between Vanessa and Matzneff rather than presenting their encounters through the visual language of conventional romance.
Filho has described her approach as concentrating on Vanessa’s emotional experience, while intimate scenes were carefully planned and discussed with the performers beforehand. The psychological violence, rather than explicit imagery, becomes central to the discomfort.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Filho keeps the camera aligned with Vanessa’s vulnerability rather than Matzneff’s fantasy. This is a film about abuse, not forbidden romance. Perspective changes everything.
Performances: Kim Higelin Makes Vanessa the Center of the Story
Kim Higelin gives the film its emotional center, portraying Vanessa across changing stages of fascination, dependency, anxiety and realization. Critics particularly praised her ability to communicate Vanessa’s changing psychological state through subtle shifts in behavior and silence.
Higelin has said she approached the role with a sense of responsibility toward Springora and wanted to extend the courage behind her testimony. That performance ultimately won Best Actress at Tallinn Black Nights and earned Higelin a César nomination for Most Promising Actress.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Higelin avoids reducing Vanessa to either a passive victim or a simplistic symbol. She makes the psychological progression of manipulation visible. Her performance gives the film its emotional force.
Jean-Paul Rouve: Charm Makes the Predator More Disturbing
Casting Jean-Paul Rouve against type is one of the film’s most effective decisions. Rather than portraying Matzneff as threatening from his first appearance, Rouve can move between apparent gentleness, intellectual charm and emotional coldness.
That matters because grooming depends partly on trust. Matzneff’s literary reputation and ability to make Vanessa feel intellectually special help conceal the enormous imbalance between them. Filho has described Rouve’s ability to shift rapidly between almost childlike candor and coldness as central to the performance.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Rouve demonstrates why predators do not always appear obviously dangerous. Charm becomes part of the manipulation. His social status makes that power even stronger.
Power & Fame: Literary Prestige Provides Protection
Consent expands beyond Vanessa and Matzneff by showing the cultural environment surrounding him. He is not presented as an isolated figure hiding from society but as a celebrated writer moving through intellectual circles in which his behavior could be discussed with extraordinary tolerance.
That context makes prestige itself part of the film’s examination of power. Fame gives Matzneff authority, intellectual credibility and social protection, while Vanessa enters the relationship as a teenager with none of those advantages. Contemporary coverage of the film has emphasized how it examines both his control over Vanessa and the society that tolerated him.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Consent argues that Matzneff’s power came from more than age. Fame and cultural prestige helped protect him. Silence allowed the imbalance to continue.
Themes & Messages: Consent Cannot Exist Without Equal Power
The title becomes increasingly significant as the film develops. Vanessa may initially understand herself as participating willingly, but the story asks whether meaningful consent can exist when age, experience, authority and psychological manipulation are so radically unequal.
Rather than presenting a simple moment when consent disappears, the film examines how grooming can distort someone's perception of what is happening. That is why emotional control is as important to the story as the physical relationship.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Consent challenges the idea that apparent agreement automatically means genuine consent. Grooming changes the conditions under which choices are made. Power matters.
What Makes This Movie Different?: The Survivor Controls the Narrative
Consent is ultimately distinguished by its perspective. Matzneff had publicly written about his relationships for years, but Springora’s memoir reversed that dynamic by allowing the person he had written about to define the experience herself.
Filho preserves that reversal by keeping Vanessa at the center. Even the filmmaking reinforces the decision: her emotions determine how the audience experiences attraction, dependency, confusion, harm and eventual recognition.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Consent does more than dramatize a notorious French scandal. It takes a story once publicly shaped by a powerful man and returns it to the woman who experienced the abuse. Reclaiming the narrative becomes part of reclaiming power.
If You Liked Consent (2023): More Powerful Dramas About Abuse, Consent and Manipulation
How to Have Sex (2023) by Molly Manning Walker
Three British teenagers travel to Malia expecting drinking, clubs and sexual adventure, but the holiday becomes a disturbing examination of sexual pressure, boundaries and consent. Like Consent, the film explores the difference between apparent participation and genuine consent, particularly when vulnerability and social pressure influence someone's choices.
Little Girl Blue (2023) by Mona Achache
Mona Achache investigates the life and death of her mother, Carole Achache, with Marion Cotillard embodying Carole as the filmmaker reconstructs her history through personal archives. The film explores abuse, trauma, memory and the consequences that can continue across generations.
Like Consent, it uses cinema to reclaim a painful personal history and place a woman's experience at the center of the narrative.
Last Summer (2023) by Catherine Breillat
Catherine Breillat's provocative drama follows a successful lawyer who begins a relationship with her teenage stepson, creating a destructive situation centered on sexuality, adult responsibility and unequal power.
It approaches its material differently from Consent, but both films force audiences to confront relationships in which age and authority create profound imbalances of power.
➡️ Key Takeaway: How to Have Sex examines sexual pressure and consent, Little Girl Blue confronts abuse and inherited trauma, while Last Summer explores sexuality and unequal power. Together with Consent, they show how contemporary cinema is confronting abuse, manipulation and the complicated power dynamics behind consent.
Final Verdict: A Disturbing Portrait of How Abuse Hides Behind Power
Consent succeeds because it refuses to treat Vanessa Springora's experience as a scandalous romance. Instead, Vanessa Filho focuses on grooming, manipulation, emotional dependency and the enormous imbalance between a teenager and a celebrated adult writer.
Kim Higelin is essential to that perspective. Her Best Actress win at Tallinn Black Nights and César nomination reflect a performance that must move Vanessa from fascination and perceived sophistication toward increasing emotional control and recognition of what is happening. The film itself received a mixed critical response, but even more skeptical assessments acknowledged the importance and timeliness of its subject.
Perhaps its greatest impact came outside traditional awards culture. After a difficult theatrical start in France, the film developed unusually strong momentum, driven partly by younger viewers and TikTok word of mouth. Its admissions actually increased rather than following the normal pattern of decline, eventually passing half a million spectators.
➡️ Final Verdict: 4.1/5 — A difficult but important biographical drama whose greatest strength is its survivor-centered perspective. Consent exposes how grooming can disguise itself as affection and how fame, admiration and authority can make manipulation harder to recognize.
Quick Facts: A True Story of Grooming, Power and Reclaiming the Narrative
Category | Details |
Original Title | Le Consentement |
Genre | Biography / Drama |
Director | Vanessa Filho |
Based On | Vanessa Springora's autobiographical book |
Countries | France / Belgium |
Language | French |
Runtime | 119 min |
Release | October 11, 2023 |
Lead Cast | Kim Higelin, Jean-Paul Rouve, Laetitia Casta |
Worldwide Gross | Approx. $4.71 million |
Awards | 1 win & 2 nominations |
Major Recognition | Best Actress — Tallinn Black Nights; 2 César nominations |
Movie Trend | Survivor-Centered True Stories |
Why Consent Still Matters: The Story Is No Longer Controlled by the Powerful Man
Consent's lasting importance comes from reversing the perspective through which this story was once publicly understood. Matzneff had written openly about his behavior and enjoyed recognition within French literary culture; Springora's memoir—and subsequently Filho's film—placed the experience of the person subjected to his actions at the center instead.
The film also arrived during a wider cinematic examination of consent, sexual abuse and coercive control in the years following #MeToo. Its unexpected popularity among younger French audiences suggests these historical stories are not being treated merely as accounts of another era.
➡️ Key Takeaway: Consent is ultimately about more than one notorious relationship. It exposes how grooming works, how status can protect abusive behavior and how survivors can reclaim stories once told by the people who held power over them. The scandal belongs to the past. The questions it raises do not.
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