“Cruel”. On Tik Tok, teenage girls film themselves crying at the release of Le Consentement, an adaptation of Vanessa Springora’s book.

Vanessa Springora’s book sold very well when it was published in 2020, selling nearly 350,000 copies. Three years later, Vanessa Filho’s film adaptation of the same name Consent, but it failed to fly when it was released on October 11. But that’s without taking into account the help of social networks, which have been inverting the scoring curve for several weeks thanks to the new “TikTok trend” (a type of viral content on the platform). In fact, the film saw a 40% increase in attendance within a week.

On the Chinese social network, young viewers, mostly girls, are filmed in front of the camera before and after viewing the work. Excitedly, we see them emerge from the darkened rooms with stilted, shocked faces. Some even go so far as to cry during voiceovers taken from a feature film. With the hashtag “consent” used nearly 27 million times in two weeks, this new trend proves that young people started the film, but especially the topic it deals with: control and child abuse.

Deaf world

This autobiographical drama chronicles the abuse of Vanessa Springora (Kim Higel) by writer and philosopher Gabriel Matzneuf (played by Jean-Paul Rouve) in the mid-1980s. At that time, the man was 50 years old. He, 14. Becoming a writer, the latter condemned this unhealthy and “traumatic” relationship in his book. Consentreturning page after page to the sexual assaults, psychological abuse, and deafening environment of the unyielding literary world. Because if Maztnef was never worried, the latter even came to defend his lifestyle on TV, his appetite for very young girls. “If sexual relations between an adult and a minor under the age of fifteen are illegal, why is there tolerance when they are carried out by a representative of the elite?” (…) It is necessary to believe that the artist belongs to a separate caste,” writes Vanessa Springora in her work.

The film brings to the screen the key parts of the preliminary work. As the author and victim himself says, “it brings something that words cannot reach”. Indeed, the scenes are raw and do not spare the viewer in any way. So many teenage girls, who perhaps also identified with the female character, couldn’t contain their shock, each commenting on it through their own videos. “The worst thing was the icy silence at the end of the movie that makes you think deeply about life and its atrocities,” the user explained. And another. “Man sometimes turns out to be the most terrible atrocity in this world.” Mathilda Bardettis, a psychology student with 100,000 Tik Tok followers, also made a lengthy video to explain her feelings about the film. “I’m not encouraging you to go and see Consent. This film is so heavy that it has to come from a personal and thoughtful question,” he explains.

The film’s producer Marc Missonier, for his part, expressed enthusiasm on X (formerly Twitter) about the excitement and awareness that young people are creating on the social network. “Teenagers bought the movie on their own. We must remain modest in this matter, it is not possible to program. But the film touched their hearts, that’s for sure,” he wrote.

For his part, Jean-Paul Rouve, who plays Gabriel Matzneff in the most challenging screen role of his career, said he was proud that they were so aware of the issue of consent. “It’s a textbook case, because I do this job, I’ve never experienced it,” he explained on Saturday, November 4, on RTL. “From our respective children, we learn that something is happening on TikTok (…) This is the best tool to warn young girls (…) it is better to be difficult to see than to live later, we are out we are coming. are different, and we’ll talk about that later,” he continued.

Consequently, the platform has been home to hundreds of videos like this for several weeks, some of which have garnered millions of views. Proving that French youth are also capable of raising their fists when it comes to topics that directly affect them. On November 2, Marc Missonnier announced in X that, thanks to him, the film had now “passed the 300,000 admission mark in France”.