Editor’s Note
This article explores Agathe Riedinger’s radical film, which follows its heroine’s assault on the artifice of reality TV, contrasting meticulous preparation with a weary, unsparkling daily reality.
A young woman covers herself in jewelry, meticulously applies makeup, slips into an outfit as light as it is uncomfortable. The meticulousness of the preparations, the habit that burdens her gestures with a dull weariness, evoke the ritual of an artist in a dressing room. A literal approach to a theme that Agathe Riedinger’s first film reclaims: femininity as performance. A radicalized approach as well because, from the first minutes, through the escalation of artifice, a disturbance is born that magnetizes the gaze.
Liane has a goal, which it would be contemptuous to call a dream, even though it will burn her all the same: to join the cast of a reality TV show – not for fame, but for the money that will lift her out of her condition, a petty thief, daughter of a kept mother, older sister to a sibling she hopes to save from her fate.
Transcending the framework of a cinema that looks at the dominated classes with feigned concern and a veneer of false neutrality, Raw Diamond surprises with its excesses, its formal exaltations that form its essence: a testing of bodies. Riedinger skillfully restores the torments of femininity, the cumbersome clatter of fake nails, strips of leather and denim constricting forms. It is also the language that leaves the field of realism to explore a slangy baroque, as much Pagnol as Aya Nakamura.
The film shows nothing of the worlds to which Liane aspires. The only tangible contact with the show is a sordid meeting with a casting director kept off-screen, which even leaves open the idea that Liane might be inventing everything. While one might be tempted to see the film as the reverse of something, of Instagram, of Frenchie Shore, Raw Diamond is only the place of itself, moored to a daily life above which nothing sparkles. An authentic monster film in the noblest sense, that of the sacrificed creature, the body bruised for an appearance whose result we no longer look at, but the cost, the work, and the wounds.
Raw Diamond by Agathe Riedinger (France, 2024, 1h 43min), starring Malou Khebizi, Idir Azougli, Andréa Bescond. In theaters November 20.
