Jean-Paul Rouve plays Gabriel Matzneff in the film adaptation of the novel “Le Consentement”, by Vanessa Springora.
We are used to seeing a mocking and amusing Jean-Paul Rouve in comedic films, rarely serious and chilling in the role of a sexual predator. In “Le Consentement”, an adaptation of Vanessa Springora’s novel which is released in cinemas this Wednesday, October 11, he embodies a completely unsuitable role. The actor lends his features to the writer Gabriel Matzneff, accused since this work published in 2019 of having maintained an abusive relationship with the author, then aged 14. He was then 50 years old.
This filming was trying for Jean-Paul Rouve, as he was able to detail in the show Beau geste this Sunday October 8 on France 2. “I realized that when I went home in the evening, it was like if I had played all day in the mud and wanted to take a shower", he recalls to Pierre Lescure.
Before detailing that he felt the need to take "a head shower, because I said so much trash all day... Your brain knows it's false, but it still keeps a little piece of everything That."
Most of the difficult scenes in the feature film were shot opposite Kim Higelin, who plays Vanessa Springora, and who is actually 22 years old: "Fortunately, she's a young woman, not a teenager," says Jean. -Paul Rouve, “because it would have been more difficult to shoot”.
But the most difficult scene to shoot for the actor was not filmed with Kim Higelin. It’s a young 14-year-old actress who this time took part in the filming for this very specific sequence. For the purposes of the scenario, the director, Vanessa Filho, then asked the actor to “pass his hand on the cheek” of his partner. “You can’t know what it was like to do that,” reacted Jean-Paul Rouve with a lot of emotion.
“It's worse than anything I shot in the film, because there I was with a young girl, a 14-year-old child. And I told myself that he was doing that (Gabriel Matzneff, Editor's note ), like that? It was the worst thing for me to do in this film, the most internally violent."
Consent, by Vanessa Filho, adapting the work of Vanessa Springora, is released in theaters this Wednesday, October 11.
