Simone: Woman of the Century

A French film that tells one woman's life from beginning to end. Simone is rounded up at sixteen. She is sent to Auschwitz with her family and her mother dies in the camp. She comes back. When she returns to France nobody wants to listen; those who try to speak are told to be quiet. She studies law. She wants to be a judge, marries, has children, and her husband does not want her to work. She becomes an inspector of prisons. She travels to them, writes about the conditions, and takes an interest in the situation of women held during the Algerian war. Then she becomes a minister. Her first business at the health ministry is the law legalising abortion. The parliamentary scene is the film's centre. She speaks at the rostrum and the deputies facing her say things that recall her camp number. From there the film moves to other fields. She becomes the first president of the European Parliament, works on migration, and in the 1980s opposes the stigma around a disease. What the narrative is interested in is not a career but continuity: the film moves constantly between the camp and the parliament and puts the two times inside the same scene. That editing choice is both its strength and its problem. The connection is strong but the narrative is cut often and the chronology comes apart. Elsa Zylberstein plays the older Simone, Rebecca Marder her youth. Elsa Zylberstein, Rebecca Marder and Élodie Bouchez are in the cast. Olivier Dahan directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes political biography and accounts of recent history. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot watch the camp scenes; the depiction is explicit and long.