An outdoor aperitif. A group of friends. Suddenly, one of them, Damien, collapses on the ground. Anna, his companion, stuck a blade in his neck. If we allow ourselves to reveal here the shocking scene which opens To insanity, fiction in two parts broadcast from 9:10 p.m. this Tuesday on M6, is that it is not the culmination of the plot. All the interest lies in the question: How to explain such a gesture?
The script then goes back in time to the night the couple met, then tells what looks like a love story but isn’t. The story has the allure of “a romantic comedy bathed in small humiliations and rotten reflections”, according to co-director Andréa Bescond. She clarifies her point: “Eleonore Bauer, who wrote the screenplay with Guillaume Labbé, has perspective on her own history. She describes well the phenomenon of control, the stages of the mechanism of the narcissistic pervert. »
“Unpacking the Mechanisms”
Marie Gillain plays Anna, a photographer comfortable in her skin and in her life, who gets along perfectly with the father of her 15-year-old son from whom she is separated. A woman far from the stereotype of the frail and vulnerable heroine. Then, she meets Damien and forms a relationship with him. The vexations under cover of humor, the prohibitions disguised as benevolent recommendations, the contradictory injunctions and the violence of this man towards her crush her slowly.
“ To insanity shows how you can manage to destroy someone who is strong, who has a position, ”says co-director Eric Métayer, noting that what this character is going through echoes the many examples of violence against women that abound in the news items sections. “It is important to dissect these mechanisms to make them accessible to the general public, continues Andréa Bescond. Today, in reaction to these cases, there are still those who say “Why did not she leave him?” »
The relationship between Damien and Anna is depicted with didacticism in To insanity without falling into the fiction folder. It makes it possible to show the insidious forms, which do not necessarily alert the entourage of the victims, of the phenomenon of influence. “Compared to the original scenario, we added a sequence with the lawyer played by Nicole Ferroni who expresses herself on social networks to make people understand the flaws in the legal system with 80% of classifications without follow-up “says the director.
“There is no concrete political will”
As a child, Andréa Bescond was the victim of a child criminal. As an adult, she gave her testimony through the show Tickles, which she brought to the screen in 2018 with Eric Métayer. Both express the desire to do “useful works” and to “shake the coconut tree”, in line with their militant commitment against violence.
“We talk to ministers, we tell them that they have an extraordinary model in Spain where for ten years, feminicides have fallen by 50%. But, to get there, you need a budget of one billion euros, you need 30,000 electronic bracelets that aren’t the rotten ones we have in France that guys can break like that, like in the business Shake it up. Making Grenelle meetings and commissions is a joke. There is no concrete political will,” she laments. To insanity also makes this bitter observation by leaving us speechless on a final scene that we will not recount here.