A mother wants to leave the past behind but her daughter wants to dig it back up. That difficult starting point is the premise of Ann Sirot and Raphaël Balboni’s Diane in the Loop.

Diane (Ninon Borsei) learns that her mother (Sandrine Blancke) was raped three years before she was born. For Diane, discovering what happened to her mother brings years of anger into focus and she becomes determined to find some form of justice, even if that means pursuing revenge. Her mother responds very differently; after living with the consequences of the rape for decades, she no longer wants what happened to have power over her life and is ready to move forward, reclaiming the parts of herself that were pushed aside for so many years.

Sirot and Balboni began developing the project almost a decade ago, before #MeToo transformed the public conversation around sexual violence. Their interest, however, is not only in the survivor’s experience, as Diane in the Loop looks at what happens to trauma when it travels through a family. This is what makes Diane’s position so complex, as the rape happened to her mother, but its consequences have reached the next generation. Diane now finds herself carrying an anger connected to an experience that was never her own. Her desire for justice is understandable, but what she wants is not necessarily what her mother needs.

Diane’s mother wants something very different from her daughter, and instead of looking for revenge, she begins to think about the life she still has ahead of her. She returns to school and allows herself to acknowledge her feelings for a woman she had loved before the assault, gradually reconnecting with a part of herself that had been buried for years. While Diane is focused on justice, her mother simply wants to move on, and the sudden death of the perpetrator gives her that chance.

The directors make an unusual choice in bringing the Western into what is otherwise a very personal family story. It is a genre we usually associate with men, revenge and justice, but here the anger belongs to the women, giving those familiar ideas a very different meaning. Cinematographer Fiona Braillon therefore has an important role in the film’s design. The landscape becomes a vital part of the story, as Diane and her mother gradually move away from the familiar surroundings and find themselves alone together against the wide, open spaces of the North Sea coast. As their setting changes, the growing physical distance from home also reflects the journey the two women are going through together.

Diane is not always an easy character to like, but that is very much the point. She is angry, frustrated and refuses to soften herself simply to make others feel more comfortable, and Ninon Borsei brings this out incredibly well.

Sandrine Blancke’s character occupies the other side of that relationship; her journey is not towards vengeance but towards recovering parts of herself that disappeared after the assault. The film connects her trauma to the life she subsequently constructed, including a heterosexuality Sirot describes as a kind of social camouflage. Her relationship with her best friend opens another possibility, not a magical cure for trauma, but the chance to stop organising her life around something another person did to her.

One question went through my mind: can a woman recover from being violated? And what happens when the consequences are carried not only by her, but by the next generation? That is where the film’s generational perspective becomes particularly important. #MeToo gave millions of women a language with which to speak about experiences that previous generations had often been expected to bury. But speaking does not automatically erase what came before; mothers and daughters can live in very different emotional and social worlds while still carrying the consequences of the same event.

By the end, Diane’s anger has not disappeared, nor should it. What matters is that she begins to find a way to live with it without allowing it to take over her life. The past cannot be changed, but it does not have to decide what comes next and perhaps that is the best revenge of all.

Rating:

Written by Maggie Gogler

Featured image courtesy of Venice Film Festival

_{View of the Arts is an online publication dedicated to film, music, and the arts, with a strong focus on the Asian entertainment industry. As we continue to grow, we aim to deepen our coverage of Asian music while remaining committed to exploring and celebrating creativity across the global arts landscape.}