Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Antigone réal. par Sophie Deraspe Miléna Santoro Deraspe, Sophie, réal. Antigone. Int. Nahéma Ricci, Maison, 4: 3, 2019. With twenty years of experience, Quebec filmmaker Sophie Deraspe is not a newcomer, but with this seventh feature which she directed, wrote, and shot, she has reached a broader audience than her previous work, including Rechercher Victor Pellerin (2006), Les signes vitaux (2009), and Les loups (2015). Inspired by Sophocles's drama (referenced by an advertisement on the side of a bus for a production of Œdipe Roi), and filtered through versions by Brecht (quoted on a blackboard) and Anouilh, this filmic adaptation also recalls the scandalous 2008 police shooting of Fredy Villanueva in Montreal. Deraspe reworks these sources through a family of Algerian immigrants who carry the original Sophoclean names and tragic destiny: here, Antigone's eldest brother, Étéocle, is shot by the police, and her delinquent brother Polynice is arrested and will be tried at eighteen as an adult. The brilliant, fiercely loyal Antigone defies the law, devising Polynice's escape from prison by changing clothes with him, helped by her Arabic-speaking grandmother, Ménécée, and her sister Ismène. Antigone and Polynice do more than cross-dress: she is heroically determined and devoted to her family, while he admits to being weak, a "nul" who squanders his sister's sacrifice, resulting in the deportation of all but Ismène, who just wants "une vie normale." Deraspe modernizes other features of the Greek tragedy, using the voices of activist and gang youths as the equivalent of the chorus or "choeur," a word that appears twice on a fence sign, underscoring the reference. The film breaks into sequences suggesting, with split-screens and strident music, the use of social media like Twitter and TikTok-style videos by Antigone's boyfriend Hémon. His graffiti of her, captioned with her catch-phrase "Mon coeur me dit," go viral on social media and television and contribute to the escalating tensions between the protagonist and the authorities, represented by courts or the St. Rose Detention Center for teen girls where Antigone spends much of the film's second half. The red logo of her face, made into wearables, also recalls the "carré rouge" of Quebec's 2012 student protests. The simulated twitter feeds point to racist and sexist attitudes towards immigrants like Antigone, while Hémon and his politician father, Christian, provide a counterweight of kindness, although Antigone's and Hémon's love and loyalty lay bare Christian's political and personal compromises. Deraspe's film, which offers a provocative exploration of urban youth culture, immigrant trauma, gender and social inequality, and media manipulation, was Canada's nomination for best international feature for the 2020 Academy awards, and won three top prizes at Whistler, the 2020 Prix collégial du cinéma québécois, and the Canada Goose for Best Canadian Feature at TIFF. While [End Page 228] revisiting Antigone's inspiring figure of resistance is not new, what makes this film compelling is the performance of the Montreal-born, Tunisian-French lead actress, Nahéma Ricci: her penetrating gaze, enhanced by the vibrant red or blue of her clothing, stays with the viewer long after the film's final freeze frame, recalling in intensity Falconetti's 1928 performance as Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc. Miléna Santoro Georgetown University (DC) Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.427 | 0.201 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".