One night in 1985, little Vanessa, who was then 13 years old, accompanied her mother to a work dinner. The famous writer Gabriel Matzneff was the star of the meeting. The author caught his eye as soon as he saw the girl and her interest in her increased when her mother explained that the young woman read eagerly and wanted to write.
On the way home, Matzneff shared the back seat of the car with Vanessa and stroked her hand. She had started hell for the innocent teenager. The writer began to harass her. He would go to the door of her school and stand there looking at her. He wrote her passionate letters. He used patience as a tactic. She waited a year, and when Vanessa turned 14, she pounced on her prey.
Vanessa Filho directs Consent, a film based on a true story that hits Spanish screens today. Jean-Paul Rouve plays the pedophile writer and Kim Higelin, who won the best actress award at the Tallinn film festival, plays Vanessa. The film is based on the book of the same title that Vanessa Springora published in 2020 recounting her relationship with Matzneff.
The writer did not force the girl, he simply seduced her with words of love and dominated her for two years. He was 50. Gabriel and Vanessa entered into a loving and sexual relationship in 1986 that lasted until 1987. The viewer of Consent cannot help but wonder how something like this could happen in a civilized country like France.
Because Gabriel Matzneff was a self-recognized pedophile. In the seventies he had published Les moins de seize ans (Those under sixteen years old), a book in which he explained that on his trips to the Philippines he had had sexual relations with boys and girls aged eight and nine. He boasted about it. And he had the applause of a good part of the intellectuals and political class of his country. He appeared on a French television program laughing at the feminists who criticized him.
Gabriel was not hiding. He dated Vanessa openly. The couple went to the park for a walk, to dinners with Gabriel’s friends, also adults, accustomed to seeing him change his girlfriend-child from time to time. In France, in the eighties, there was impunity for pedophiles.
