‘The Accusation’ movie review: Yvan Attal’s complex legal drama
Yvan Attal’s The Accusation is a tense, complex personal and legal drama dealing in an unusual, purposely ambiguous way with a sexual assault case. In the process, it forces the audience to see the alleged assault from multiple perspectives and consider the influence of factors and presumptions that are not always considered. The film is long and complicated and leans heavily on a lengthy and detailed criminal trial that takes up the second half. However, The Accusation remains engrossing due to the well-developed personal conflicts among the characters and even more to the ongoing mystery it sustains throughout, its continuous manipulation of facts to keep the audience uncertain.
The storyline is two steps removed from actual events. In 2016, an American rape case received considerable media attention, involving a young man named Brock Turner, then a student at Stanford University. Turner was accused and convicted of raping an unconscious woman, but many features of the case, including the drastically differing accounts of the event and the unexpected sentence, were unusual. The incident was the inspiration for Karine Tuil’s 2019 novel Les Choses Humaines (Human Things).
Along with familiarising herself with the original trial, Tuil attended rape trials in France and interviewed lawyers on the Turner case as research for her novel, which received major literary prizes, but also mixed reactions to her approach to the assault at the heart of the plot. The Accusation is an adaptation of Tuil’s novel by director Attal and his co-writer Yaël Langmann, but one which pushes the book’s theme of uncertainty and the elusiveness of truth much further.
Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Claire Farel, a journalist who is introduced to participating in a panel discussion on sexual assault. Her 22-year-old son from a previous marriage is Alexandre Farel – played by Ben Attal, the son of Gainsbourg and the film’s director, making it something of a family project. Claire’s partner is a professor, Adam Wizman (Mathieu Kassovitz), who is also divorced. When Wizman’s daughter, Mila, visits at the same time as Alexandre, the couple suggests he take Mila along to a party he plans to attend at his university. Pains have been taken to establish that Mila has been raised by her mother in a strict Orthodox Jewish household and is sheltered and unworldly. This can be seen in Mila’s visible discomfort around Alexandre’s wealthy, sophisticated friends at the party. The scene ends, and the next thing we see is Alexandre waking the next morning to find police at his door, charging him with rape and taking him into custody.
The film has prepared the way for the rape charge in previous scenes, which have dealt in passing with many possible levels of consent, coercion, or roughness in normal, consensual relations. As the criminal case develops, multiple perspectives are shown, not only Mila’s and Alexandre’s but those of their family members, including Mila’s distraught mother. Intimate scenes of secondary characters are presented without comment, apparently to explore further the range of aggression in officially consensual sex. As the trial approaches, tensions rise, family disputes break out, an ill-considered comment by a relative results in a flood of negative publicity, and the trial begins with a background of public indignation. The well-chosen ensemble cast carries these scenes effectively.
The trial continues to explore questions of perception and misunderstandings resulting from differing attitudes, expectations, and cultural norms. Alexandre’s former girlfriend is called a witness; her testimony expands on the subtleties of consent within a relationship but offers no real insights into the case. Her uncertainty when asked whether something was “normal” or not represents much of the testimony, suggesting there may be no clear consensus on what is normal or acceptable. Claire Farel, Alexandre’s mother, gives a moving but ultimately unhelpful testimony. Alexandre seems to clearly believe in his own innocence. However, his casual attitude toward the situation, along with his sense of status, gives an appearance of disdain and entitlement, which works strongly against him as a defendant. Solid facts are endlessly elusive. Meanwhile, we are provided brief flashbacks to the night of Alexandre’s party, which provide no information on the alleged assault but expand on the two young people’s very different experiences of the evening.
Spoiler alert: no definitive closure exists for anyone involved, including the viewer. The dramatic but too drawn-out courtroom scene ends with an appropriately noncommittal decision. In keeping with the theme, the audience is offered no moment of absolute clarity and no total vindication of either side. That is, of course, by design. As the trial concludes, we are finally given a lengthier flashback of Alexandre and Mila on the night in question, which provides more information but not a definitive answer. The story may be taken as an explanation of why rape may not be satisfactorily dealt with, or alternately, of why rape accusations result in a rush to judgment, or of both at once. For all its flaws, the film makes clear the uncomfortable ambiguity and misperception possible in virtually any ‘human things’ and the human tragedies that can easily result.