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Recently shown at the Cannes International Film Festival, The Rapture (French: Le Ravissement) starts out seeming like it might be a slow true to life tale of a woman’s personal struggles, but soon becomes a thrilling pile up of increasingly bad decisions that somehow make sense when experienced through the main character’s sleepy, half soulful half blank eyes. Those eyes belong to Lydia (Hafsia Herzi), a young midwife. And they are the only things that belong to her.
We first see her rushing through the streets with a cake for the birthday of her best friend Salomé (Nina Meurisse). Lydia makes a quick stop to change at the apartment she shares with her boyfriend. As she disrobes in front of him, he confesses he’s been with another woman. She tries to get him to say it was just sex, something she can be okay with. He tells her that it’s more. Despite this shattering news, she makes it to the nightclub party on time. Lydia and Salomé go to the club washroom together. It feels like they’re about to do drugs in a stall but instead Salomé reveals she’s pregnant.
Writer-director Iris Kaltenbäck has said “Alfred Hitchcock’s body of work accompanied [her] adolescence.” In her debut feature, she’s generated incredible suspense worthy of him. This builds over the course of the film as we breathlessly watch Lydia hurtle inevitably towards her fate, but also in the jaw-dropping scene where she delivers Salomé’s baby. Lydia shows a confidence that either comes from competence, recklessness, or both.
The midwife scenes were shot in a documentary style, with Hafsia Herzi assisting real pregnant women as much as she was allowed. This realism adds to the drama of the film and the realness of Lydia’s friendship with Salomé. In a hospital consultation scene before the delivery we see them joking “Show me your pussy. Just a bit of tits.”
A male narrator recounts the story throughout. We meet him at the same time as Lydia does in the movie. His name is Milos (Alexis Manenti), a night bus driver and the son of Serbian immigrants. The sleepy eyed Lydia meets the insomniac Milos who drives at night because he may as well take a job during the hours he can’t sleep. Lydia’s double life begins to take shape in the time most are asleep.
With Lydia stranded at the end of his bus route, Milos takes her for a meal then to his place where they have sex. Unlike Lydia’s previous boyfriend and the other woman, for Milos this was just sex. Lydia starts her fabrication of the truth in a way some might call crazy but some might call harmless: she gets back into his apartment by claiming she lost an earring during their one night stand.
The film builds from there in a very plausible feeling way. Salomé’s post-partum depression, Lydia’s access to the medical profession, Milos’ self-perception as a lone wolf (“I drove from stop to stop, but had no destination”), they all work together to justify Lydia’s insane decisions. Herzi manages to create a sympathetic character despite everything she does wrong. Manenti gives Milos a sweetness despite some dickish behaviour. Together, Herzi and Meurisse create a real friendship that gives the story even more weight.
Watching the film I wasn’t sure if the French title has the same connotation as its English translation of biblical rapture, the end times event in which all true Christians vanish from the Earth and ascend to heaven. Lydia makes Salomé’s baby disappear from her life and reemerge in her own fantasy one where it is fully her child. In an interview, Kaltenbäck has said the title comes from the Marguerite Duras novel Le Ravissement de Lol. V Stein. This title was translated into English in the ‘60s first as “The Ravishing” then later as “The Rapture”. Of the novel’s influence, Kaltenbäck describes how “traumatic things reemerge slowly, in the most unexpected and untimely manner,” and that “silence inhabits the character and inhabits her actions.”
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