A film by Beth de Araújo
With: Mason Reeves, Channing Tatum, Gemma Chan, Philip Ettinger, Syra McCarthy, Eleanore Pienta, Dana Millican, Michael Angelo Covino, Stefanie Estes, Michael X. Sommers
After eight-year-old Josephine accidentally witnesses a crime in Golden Gate Park, she begins to act out violently to protect herself. This emotional trauma leads to conflicts between her parents as they search for justice, and a way to feel safe again.
Our rate : ★★
Josephine opens in a highly symbolic manner, heralding an arthouse film. A young girl is urged by her father not to be afraid, to overcome her fears, to step outside a garage with its oppressive four walls and blocked horizons. The father invites the girl to run away, to jump, before the door closes and plunges her into total darkness. He raises her like a boy, appealing to her courage. What follows is a journey through an American seaside town, with roads overhung by cables of all kinds and billboards, whose symmetry is captured by the photographer, offering striking lines that are elegantly broken by the girl’s balloon sent into the air. Josephine’s staging immediately takes us back to contemporary America, to those few forgotten fringes that are far removed from the American Dream, but which are the lifeblood of independent cinema. Beth de Araujo then chooses to set up the mechanics of her film: a subject exposed, a starting point event, a legal battle and family consequences, before a trial. The film took off at Sundance, where it was screened and won the Grand Jury Prize, and many considered it one of the favorites at this year’s Berlinale. Its disturbing subject matter comes from the director’s own past: at the age of 7, she witnessed an attempted rape with her father, which he managed to stop. For years, she tried to understand what she had witnessed, haunted by the images and filled with anxiety. Years later, she seeks to question this America, where daily crime terrorizes its inhabitants. This project has been close to her heart for a long time, but it took longer than expected to come to fruition. In addition to the questions raised by the film, the director seeks to assert several positions. The first, political, questions the lenient prison sentences given to rapists, who can thus reoffend when they are released from prison, if they are convicted at all. The second, more interesting in itself, argues that women today are weary and neglected, and that many of them do not dare to prosecute their attackers for various reasons, including a form of fatalism (it doesn’t do much good), but also fear of not being able to move on or be healed. The third questions a child’s view of this disastrous spectacle of repeated acts. These questions take precedence over the staging, which then abandons its artistic objectives to devote itself entirely to highlighting these questions. In fact, in order to intensify her message, Beth de Araujo opts for cinematographic principles that she will never abandon, which she hammers home to the viewer, inviting them to share the anguish of the young girl, but also that of her parents and their thirst for justice. Mental imagery plays a large part in the young girl’s understanding of the world, while her father and mother are reduced to highly stereotypical characters, each representing a position on the issue: one representing women around the world, the other a counterexample of today’s man, a responsible, protective man with values and courage. The real victim of the story deliberately disappears from the narrative, only to reappear and deliver a predictable message, a thank you. In itself, the script sinks into very predictable postures, because they are too obvious from scene to scene, according to the sound principle that today’s viewers should be allowed to leave for a few minutes and then return to the film after their absence, with the immediate effect of stagnating the narrative. Paranoia, or more precisely a generalized feeling of fear, takes over, especially since the only solutions the film offers to reduce crime consist of tougher and more severe justice, without ever, for example, questioning the mental health of the perpetrator of the crime and seeking, as Sidney Lumet would probably have done, to find the root causes of this state of affairs. The causes are not the subject of Josephine. The subject of Josephine is the social cruelty of America, where numerous rapes take place every day, a subject that we find in Franco, for example, when he looks at Mexico. His subject is Josephine, the little girl, his subject is Beth de Araujo, who years later speaks out through Josephine. The result: a film that will touch those who embrace the cause it defends and drowns in the silent gaze of the young girl, and will unfortunately leave those who see through all the script and formal tricks uninterested, despite its qualities.