Movie Monday August 29: Flashback

My movie for this week is one that’s been on my watchlist since it was released in 2021, but popped up as a recommendation today. Flashback, a French film, presents itself as a comedy, but actually has a deeper meaning to its amusing story.

**Warning, mild spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t watched the movie yet, what are you doing?**

Charlie Leroy (Caroline Vigneaux) is a driven but self-centered Parisian lawyer who does anything to get what she wants. After she wins a trial for her rapist client by saying the accuser consented because she was wearing a thong, karma catches up to her. The trial sets a dangerous precedent, but Charlie doesn’t care. She celebrates her win with colleagues and friends, drinking and taking drugs at a club. When she hails a cab to get home, however, she finds herself thrown back in time by a magical cab driver Hubert (Issa Doumbia). Charlie meets famous women in French history, like Joan of Arc (Emy Letertre), Olympe de Gouges (Sylvie Testud), and George Sand (Suzanne Clément). In each time period she visits, from prehistory to the 1980s, she experiences the mistreatment and abuse of women. She always dies during a witch trial, is arrested for wearing pants, and is arrested again for arguing with Napoleon (Florent Peyre) about the place of women and society. There are moments of hope, like when she helps convince the Education Minister Aristide Briand (Bruno Solo) to hire Marie Curie (Lison Daniel) as the first female professor at the Sorbonne or when women got the right to vote in 1945. In between these historic moments, Charlie interacts with the women in her family. She meets her grandmother in 1945, who isn’t allowed to vote because her husband won’t let her, witnesses her mother’s abuse at the hand of her father, and meets her mother again at the trial of Marie-Claire Chevalier in 1972. These experiences make her care about people other than herself. She also gets the chance to right her wrongs and change the outcome of the rapist’s trial.

Flashback was a really interesting movie. I know a little bit about French history, but I learned a lot more about the injustices of the French legal system towards women as well as the leaps feminists made in the 20th century. Initially I thought this was going to be a lot funnier, but I ended up enjoying the film. It was educational without being boring and was clear in its messaging without being preachy. It’s definitely a movie for the #MeToo era, but the fact that it touches on important moments in history shows that this has been a movement hundreds of years in the making.

I enjoyed the performances of all the actors, but the audience really only spends a significant amount of time with Charlie. That’s not to say that the other actors were underwhelming, it’s just that it covers a lot with its hour thirty-minute run time. Suzanne Clément had a short but impactful performance as George Sand and Sophia Aram’s Gisèle Halimi (the lawyer in the Chevalier trial) was powerful. Halimi’s speech was taken from the actual trial transcripts and went on to be a key to the legalization of abortion in France.

I thought that Flashback was brief but impactful and added small moments that might seem insignificant today but were huge hurdles and triumphs for women of the past. It also helped remind me that Parisian women weren’t legally allowed to wear pants without a doctor’s note until 2013 (look it up, it’s crazy). I’d probably watch it again at some point, but not necessarily when I’m in the mood for a comedy.

One moment that made me laugh: When Charlie is at a 1793 political meeting where women aren’t allowed to speak on the platforms. She adds funny little commentaries, annoying some of her fellow women, but shows how far women have gone in politics in the past 229 years.

One moment that made me laugh: When Charlie travels to 1982, the first International Women’s Day, and witnesses her father’s abusiveness. We the audience also see how she got a burn that her father later convinced her was a birthmark. It’s a brief heartbreaking moment. While in 1982, she also learns that Olympe de Gouges and Marquis de Condorcet, both of whom she met in 1793, were eventually killed during the Revolution.

Overall, I’d give Flashback 7 illegally-worn pants out of 10.