Almost everyone knows Britney Spears and perhaps her bad times are conveyed by the celebrity press as her artistic show. Framing Britney Spears, produced by the New York Times and directed by Samantha Stark, therefore aims to rehabilitate the artist’s tarnished image and restore the truth to lynching in the media in 2000. After doing a lot of noise in the United States, is this new? documentary arrives in France on Amazon Prime Video worth the big buzz?

Unlike previous reports and documentaries that focused more on Britney Spears’ career, Framing Britney Pears was meant to be much more intimate and engaged. Through its simple staging and chronological narrative, the documentary highlights the abuse of media in which the young singer fell victim to her debut on stage and questions her placement under guardianship in 2008, which left her father and lawyers in complete control. over his personal and professional life, as well as his grip on finances. He therefore extensively traces his rise to fall, taking a new look, much more empathetic to him and critical of his detractors, at the events that made headlines in the celebrity press in the 2000s.

This welcome recontextualization revolves primarily around misogyny and sexism in the media realm, particularly slut-shaming (making women feel guilty about their sexuality), with infamous interviews currently having electric shock value. . Therefore, this new documentary dedicated to the artist has an innovative feminist approach, while its content uses the same archival images, viewed and reviewed dozens of times, providing particular interest from this point of view.

In addition to the media’s disrespectful and intrusive behavior, which allows themselves to comment, judge and question her sexuality, body and even motherhood, the film also examines the presence of paparazzi in her daily life, as well as her image. fabricated that they sent back from him via an unattractive stolen image. The shaky justifications and denials of photographer Daniel Ramos are certainly the best acknowledgment of this tenacity that ultimately qualifies as harassment, even if it is indeed the only time where the lack of confrontation benefits the documentary.

If the words are clearly published in the media and it is difficult to confront directly when the main stakeholders are unwilling to participate in the project, it is still a pity that voyeurism and public insensitivity are not objects of analysis in their own right and are hardly discussed. The documentary directed by Samantha Stark prefers to avoid this problem by highlighting a passionate and compassionate fan for placing this collective responsibility on some people, in particular her father, Jamie Spears, in the midst of a legal battle against his daughter.

Even if it is done with kindness and wants to denounce the injustice of liberticide, the subject of the documentary can’t help but tout and can’t help but take on a person’s dimension by further interfering with his personal life, again dissected using archival images. . Yet it is clear that the work has instructive value, if only to be placed under guardianship and its legal troubles, the Britney Spears case being a priori unique in its kind, raises some questions about individual freedoms and rights in the United States. .

However, the film relies too much on the speaker’s words, without questioning it too much, especially when it comes to the #FreeBritney movement, which is the origin of the documentary. Wanting to free one’s speech by taking it in its place is a contradictory exercise, which can however be fruitful as long as one does not hide this paradox, draw conclusions from it or identify avenues for reflection. But the documentary does little to support the fact that social networks, while allowing Britney to reclaim her image, could also be a new source of negative media enthusiasm for her.

The fact that two speakers were so enthusiastic about researching and interpreting an artist’s Instagram content that it led to a podcast called Britney’s Grams, without journalists seeing it as a new form of stalking and bullying is a regrettable loss of perspective and analysis. . Instead, the documentary was content to show that the media had shot him in favor of it years later, never to question the great concern and even the theory he came up with again, always against his will.

few weeksafter Framing Britney Spears aired on Hulu in the United States, the star took to Instagram, admitting to being ashamed of being in the spotlight again: ” I cried for two weeks, j’ we still cry sometimes […] I’m always judged, humiliated and humiliated by the media.to sum up the fact that Britney Spears remains an unpredictable person. for those who observe his life with him. magnifying glass and that he is the only one who can legitimately tell his story.