Jean-Claude Monod is a French philosopher.
Eighteenth century. Anne, growing up as a girl, must "change her clothes" because of her attraction to women. Anne (Marie Toscan du Plantier) was born in 1742 with both female and male genitalia. The child grows up in a convent and then, as a teenager, is asked to wear men's clothes.... When he became a man, he married but was soon condemned as a defiler of marriage.
The true and moving story (which came to us thanks to the memoir of the lawyer that "Michel Foucault" studied in his history of sexuality) of Anne Grandjean, born intersex, and her resounding trial, which still raises questions today today all our certainties. There is, one suspects, no coincidence in the fact that the director is interested in this very fertile period in philosophical matters with the famous Enlightenment of thought, where paradoxically homosexuality, hermaphroditism were severely repressed, even the death penalty for some. In this sense, Un jour fille is a very current film, very contemporary in its intentions, in a period where the question of social, cultural or sexual identities has never been so present at the heart of the debates.
Note of intent from Jean-Claude Monod:
I discovered the story of Anne Grandjean through a quick mention by Michel Foucault in his course at the Collège de France, "Les Anormalaux", which piqued my curiosity. I searched for and found the Memoir of the lawyer who, in 1765, had pleaded for Anne Grandjean on appeal, and who to do so reconstructed her life. This story immediately fascinated me.
"Our decision was to avoid two easy ways: to make this story a melodrama, and to make its main character a rebel. Anne / Jean-Baptiste is certainly upset by the transformations imposed on her, but she can first oppose them (in front of her father) only with tears, then (in the face of the village's hostility) escape. She, however, evolves, protests against the fate meted out to her during the trial, appeals... Violence certainly falls regularly on the character but the story which is "saved" or relaunched by a certain optimism of the Enlightenment, ultimately embodied by the lawyer Vermeil. ".
"Jean-Claude Monod creates a film full of ethics and moral philosophy while promoting the truly romantic journey of Anne Grandjean. The young woman shows a determination for extraordinary happiness, while trying to cope with what we today call intersexuality. She refuses political speeches on the subject, her main ambition being to live out her love for her wife and earn a decent living as a seamstress. Despite herself, she becomes Jean-Baptiste Grandjean, which gives her the right to marry. The new man devoted himself to the theater, where he discovered the works of Marivaux among others, who already promoted cross-dressing. » (see Read).
Marie Toscan shines in the role and if we clearly perceive the economy of means compared to the usual productions of this scale, the management of this minimalism of the sets, the costumes, the writing or the acting of the actors is quite skilful so that it is in no way detrimental to this ambitious and generous work.
"The tragic fate of Anne Grandjean is a powerful reminder that moralism is never far away in the way a society approaches the question of difference. More than ever, the feature film urges us to immerse ourselves in the readings of Voltaire, Montesquieu or, further upstream, the plays of Molière or Marivaux which, already in their time, forcefully posed the sensitive question of gender and freedoms public". (To see, to read)
