Martin Provost’s fine film is about the writer’s life, with all its loneliness, yearning and furious resentment of others’ success. It recounts a passionate but little known mentor-student relationship of authors in postwar Paris, one Provost depicts as a denied love affair, with its frustrations displaced into art. Perhaps it’s comparable to Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage in 18th-century London. Sandrine Kiberlain is superb as Simone de Beauvoir – demanding, principled and controlled. Emmanuelle Devos is even better as penniless, neurotic Violette Leduc, who arrives like a stalker on De Beauvoir’s doorstep with the dog-eared manuscript of her unpublished novel, L’Asphyxie (or Imprisoned in My Skin). Simone coolly recognises it as the product of a raw, courageous brilliance that perhaps outstrips her own. Doggedly, De Beauvoir supports Leduc’s faltering career with money and advice, while Leduc remains in an agony of resentment at the charity and of unrequited love. For all the chaos and pain, it is weirdly romantic: a glorious tale of wish-fulfilment, confirming that writers really can attain self-validation through the pen. Devos’s Violette is supposed to be ugly; actually, this actor’s jolie-laide presence is, as ever, intensely sexy, endowing Violet’s drama-queen self-pity with enormous charisma.