Abuse of Weakness

Plot

Maud Schoenberg (Isabelle Huppert) suffers a cerebral hemorrhage that leaves her paralysed on one half of her body. After a year of intense therapy Maud, a director, begins to work on a new project. After seeing an interview with a con-man, Vilko Piran (Kool Shen), she immediately asks him to star as the lead in her film, about a lower-class man who falls in love with a famous actress, eventually beating her to death. Vilko accepts but insists that he see Maud as much as possible before filming begins.

Cast

Production

In 2007, Breillat met notorious conman Christophe Rocancourt, and offered him a leading role in a movie that she was planning to make, based on her own novel Bad Love, and starring Naomi Campbell. Soon after, she gave him €25,000 to write a screenplay titled La vie amoureuse de Christophe Rocancourt (The Love Life of Christophe Rocancourt), and over the next year and a half, would give him loans totalling an additional €678,000. In 2009, a book written by Breillat was published, in which she alleged that Rocancourt had taken advantage of her diminished mental capacity, as she was still recovering from her stroke. The book was entitled Abus de faiblesse, a French legal term usually translated as "abuse of weakness" and was the basis for the movie of the same title.

Reception

Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes reported an approval rating of 87%, based on 30 reviews, with an average score of 6.8/10. The site's consensus reads, "Abuse of Weakness' fact-based plot proves that truth can be stranger than fiction -- and provide grist for compelling character studies." At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 77, based on 16 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".