“Diamant Brut is a thought-provoking, well-conceptualized debut for Riedinger with a star-making turn to boot, and Riedinger’s insight and empathy might get her far in a French cinema landscape in which the position and perception of women is in dire need of change.”

Everyone can become an icon. That is the idea that we are bombarded with by the media, whether social or more traditional. Beauty is an asset, and if you don’t possess it plastic surgery is just a click away. To be someone means having a certain amount of power, and this idea is alluring to people who don’t have any, especially young and impressionable ones. And with the uniquity of reality TV, just being yourself can mean being someone. The focus of Agathe Riedinger’s strong debut Diamant Brut (Wild Diamond), which oscillates between a Dardennes-esque slice of social realism and a more lyrical approach regarding female beauty, consists of multiple gazes. The audience’s, who judge beauty in part based on what the media serve up, and the heroine’s, whose gaze at her friends and at men is shaped by an absence of love from her mother, the one person she needs it from. Her quest to become someone through reality TV is a quest for attention, something she hopes to achieve through her beauty; to be seen and desired is to be loved, at least that is the idea. But the path to fame and beauty is a difficult one.

Fréjus, halfway between the glitz of Cannes and the madness of Marseille. Liane (Malou Khebizi) is a young influencer who aims for the former but is more stuck in the latter. Living with her single, jobless mother Sabine (Andréa Bescond) and her little sister Alicia (Ashley Romano), Liane dreams of making it big; her whole world revolves around the followers on her Instagram and the love and compliments they shower her with. She and her mother have a difficult relationship, with Sabine specifically not showering her daughter with love. The abrasive Liane believes that her beauty will get her somewhere, and somewhere means money, which her small family is forever short on. Her big shot at fame is a casting for a reality TV show, who are interested in having her on for all the wrong reasons; the job qualifications basically boil down to looking sexy and being able to start conflict. Liane puts everything aside for this chance, her friendships and her budding romance with Dino (Idir Azougli), a romantic soul who tries to break through the wall Liane has drawn up around her. The longer it takes for her to hear back from the production company, the more desperate Liane becomes.

Contrary to what her attitude and appearance may suggest, Liane is actually deeply religious and honest in her love for God, and the film has some quite overt religious symbolism, down to Liane being a virgin like Mary. She also is a mother of sorts, with a fierce love and protectiveness over her little sister Alicia, filling in the role Sabine fails at. And to complete the female trinity, society’s general perception of women like Liane, who dress sexy and expose their beauty on Instagram, is that of ‘attention whores’, if it doesn’t directly see them as prostitutes. This relates back to the conditioned (male) gaze of the audience and the way Liane presents herself, which in itself is rooted in a paradox: a woman’s sex appeal is connected to her beauty, of which presentation is a big part, but having sex appeal also degrades her to little more than an object of sexual desire. The hyper-sexualization of women at once puts them on a pedestal and reduces them to a male fantasy. The devotion from some of Liane’s social media followers, as intermittently displayed on screen through walls of comments, shows this same dichotomy: some of them are almost poetic and lyrical, others downright lurid. To further the religious themes, the show Liane auditions for is called Miracle Island, referring to the supernatural but also to shows like Love Island, whose female contestants aren’t exactly seen as paragons of chastity, a view often solely based on their looks and demeanor.

Riedinger’s direction also mixes this slice-of-life ‘trashiness’ with a more lyrical, heightened approach, as if again giving us two different gazes. The audience looks at Liane and sees ‘bad’ taste: the skimpy dresses, the excessive makeup, the tacky jewelry; we are supposed to see through this and find the beauty in Liane and be empathetic towards her need for reassurance, as if to say that underneath that sexual exterior is also a person with thoughts and dreams just like the rest of us. Liane’s gaze is through rose-coloured glasses, tinted by the myths perpetuated by social media. Stage dancers at a local club are put on an almost literal pedestal, goddesses who represent what Liane desires: to be looked at and admired. In these moments Riedinger drowns out the pounding beats and replaces them with the strings of a single cello, stepping away from the handheld reality of Liane’s day-to-day life to give us a world of fantasy and glamour. Two scenes show two different faces of this glamourous fantasy. In one, Liane witnesses a luxurious photo shoot in a villa in the hills above Fréjus, the model at the heart of it another goddess at the center of attention. In the other, she finds herself in similar surroundings at a party for the well-to-do, and discovers that being a beautiful woman at the center of attention also comes with grave danger. She is clever enough to turn the situation to her favor, but she also learns that being desired does not always automatically bring the love she so craves.

Despite switching between naturalistic and heightened in her approach, Riedinger sticks to an Academy ratio throughout the film. Part of this is to emulate the suffocating pressure Liane puts on herself by looking up to the reality TV stars whose shows are just outside the frame but fill the soundscape. The frame also fixes our gaze on Liane though, and forces us to reconsider our perception of her through that gaze. The camera spends virtually every frame looking at her, scanning her body, painting the picture of a young woman who wants to be loved but can’t love back. In a film about gaze and perception, being in every frame requires something special, and newcomer Malou Khebizi, a non-professional found through an open casting, is a remarkable find. She infuses Liane with the restlessness and aggression that stem from a ruthless desire to ‘make it’, but she also gives the character emotional fragility and at times a surprising elegance. It is an eye-opening performance that recalls the ferocious abandon of Adèle Exarchopoulos in Blue Is the Warmest Colour, and will place Khebizi at the forefront of talents to watch should she choose to pursue a further career in acting. Her Liane may be a diamond in the rough with many facets to show, but the same goes for Khebizi herself.

Weaponizing sexuality to climb the social ladder is nothing new, and certainly not something that the egocentric world of social media has introduced; that just makes it easier. Diamant Brut‘s press kit refers to the ‘cocottes’ of turn-of-20th-century France; women who, like Liane, came from poor, low social standing but used their sexuality to work their way up to positions of wealth and power. The character’s name is a blatant reference to one of the most famous of these women, Liane de Pougy. Like her, Liane knows that playing the pretty princess that women are expected to be can bring a lot. But because of the strained relationship with her mother, this comes at a price in the way she shuts herself off from emotion, and that is an inability to reciprocate the love shown to her, even when it is nakedly honest like Dino’s. Diamant Brut is a thought-provoking, well-conceptualized debut for Riedinger with a star-making turn to boot, and Riedinger’s insight and empathy might get her far in a French cinema landscape in which the position and perception of women is in dire need of change.