So, i finally got myself to watch the french movie “Presque comme les autres” (“Almost like the others”), that i talked about a few months before. Basically, it’s inspired by the real story of the french actor, Francis Perrin, his son, Louis Perrin, and what Francis and his wife got through to get an autistic diagnosis for their son.
And yeah, as you can guess it, the movie is all about the parents. How it’s sad for them, how it’s hard for them, how they have to sacrifice so much of their life for their little boy, who is so “weird”... I noted only two good things about this movie :
- One, it highlights very well how much France and french people are ignorant towards autism. No one was able to say what was different with the little boy, Tom, and they were all throwing reprimands at the parents for the fact that they have a big difference of age, that Tom’s mother didn’t breastfeed him, that they were spoiling him and that was why he was different.
They even threw a diagnosis of Myopathy, even if Tom didn’t meet any of the criteria. It says a lot about the situation regarding autism in my country. People are SO ignorant. Even the father was in denial, because for a lot of people, autism is the same as Rain Man. And they don’t know that autism comes in a lot of shapes. That every autistic person is different from the other. They don’t know anything, even “specialists”.
- Two, they used autistic actors to portray autistic characters. We can see two autistic characters in the movie : Tom, who’s three years old, and Romeo, a teenager who’s portrayed by Louis Perrin himself. While i’m all about autistic characters portrayed by autistic people (and the teen actor was the one to decide that he wanted to be in this movie), i’m worried about what the little kid went through during the shooting. What was he able to grasp ? What did they do to him to get him to react a certain way or another ? Thankfully, we never have to saw him displaying a Self-Injury Behavior (they only show the aftermath, like a forehead painted with fake blood), but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t stressful for him. I’m always mefiant towards movies and stuff like that involving very young kids, autistic, allistic, or neurotypical kids.
On the other hand, i LOVED the moment where we get to see Romeo. I really hope Louis Perrin get more roles in other movies because, yeah, the kid can act. It was just a cameo, but it felt so good to have, AT LEAST, two minutes in the movie during which i didn’t felt bad for being... well... autistic.
I wouldn’t recommand this movie to an autistic audience. The guilt trip is obnoxious and i even start to feel bad, like “Was it so hard for my parents to raise me ?”. The movie awakened my internal ableism and, oh boy, i need to watch or read a positive thing to get better.
In a way, this movie is good to actually show how much France is actually bad and late, regarding the autism subject. But i wouldn’t recommand it to a NT audience either, because... well... the last five minutes are all about praising ABA.
I don’t know what happen to Louis, what they did to him in ABA, if he’s fine with himself, if he’s okay, but i know that ABA is not a good thing and that i don’t want to recommand to anyone a movie that praises a therapy similar to conversion therapies for LGBT people. It’s ridiculous, we’re so late in France that, when America starts to realize that ABA might not be the best thing for autistic people (yeah, no kidding), France is getting interested in ABA therapy and even starts to believe in the vaccine theory. Ew...
A big, big deception, this movie. Because the production was using actually autistic actors, i was hoping that it would be good. But it’s not.
I’ll make a post after about the video game “Anxiety : lost night”. It seems to be a trend to use autism as a cheap plot twist or a mean to highlight how much it’s “hard” for neurotypicals to put up with us. It makes me so angry.
