Interview with Fleur Fortuné, Director of ‘The Assessment’

There’s an urgency that Fleur Fortuné brings to her voice when she discusses her debut film, The Assessment, "The more we were working on it, the more it was becoming real." As she’s talking about the dystopian setting of the story of a couple in a post-modern authoritarian society, she’s describing something close to dread. "You kind of think, as a human being, that you're gonna go in the better, in the brighter direction, but now I feel like we are going in the darker direction."

This convergence of fiction and reality wasn't what Fortuné intended when she started crafting her dystopian vision six years ago. The film was born from a deeply personal story, a frustrating fertility journey that forced her to confront questions about the systems that govern our daily lives.

"Because I was struggling so much to have kids, I started to really ask myself the question, after years, why do I really want to have a kid and to bring a child to this world with all the environmental issues?" This existential conundrum crystalized through what Fortuné describes as an "absurd medical journey," a labyrinthian prison of bureaucracy grounded in medicine's patriarchal foundations.

"You're doing like three years of tests before they start to do even one single test on your husband," she observes. In her film, the medical establishment's gender bias becomes a microcosm for larger systems of control.

This led to a realization that laid the groundwork for her artistic vision: "I remember after ideas, I was talking to a doctor and he confessed to me that they didn't really know what they were doing." Fortuné declares, "When you're a normal human being, and you go to a doctor, you think that they have all the answers, but in the end, it's just like other human beings that don't really know."

The world of The Assessment showcases environmental loss through subtraction; there is no wood used in the film at all. The forests are all gone. "If we want to raise kids and have more on our planet, why are we so eager to destroy it?" Fortuné leaves that question deliberately hanging. This absence of trees isn't dramatized through scenes of environmental catastrophes but through normalized lack. Nobody mentions what's missing because this is just how things are now.

Fortuné directed her film during a period of global regression in reproductive rights. This timeliness infuses it with a unique sense of political urgency and relevance. "I was confused with everything that is happening in the world, with the US going backward, with abortion and all that," she says. "It's more about freedom and just raising the question of what we are doing and the freedom for women to make their own choice."

The Assessment portrays the erosion of freedom as a gradual process rather than a dramatic upheaval. "I think freedom of speech is so endangered today. Everyone is so scared to just say, 'I think that,' or this, or just even saying 'You know what, this is happening.'"

This self-censorship, as Fortuné suggests, is equivalent to a kind of death of the soul. "The moment we stop to say what we believe in, or to fight for what we believe in, or to say what we think. It's kind of a big part of our humanity that is taken from us."

The Assessment shows the kind of fascism that arrives slowly rather than through a violent coup. "Everyone seems to be so happy at the beginning of the film, even though they're living under crazy rules," Fortuné explains. "This is how you can, without knowing that it is happening, find yourself living in a dictatorship. It starts with one test, and then the second test, and then you accept one thing and the second thing and the third thing, until you are like, into a nightmare."

Her film's intimate scale, three characters in closed quarters, creates what Fortuné describes as "always two against one," a microcosm of shifting power dynamics. A wealthy couple who "think that they have access to everything" discover their privilege offers no immunity from the slow creep of authoritarianism; they are "victims of their own system that they participated in."

Alicia Vikander delivers a performance of startling complexity as Virginia, a state employee who embodies modern contradiction as "totally one of the tools of this society and the true victim of this society at the same time." Fortuné layered the character with psychological depth: "When she's playing that child, maybe she's playing the memory of her own child, which is making her suffer. It's like a never-ending loop of suffering."

To develop the character's unsettling childlike physicality, Fortuné and Vikander rejected caricature. "We talked a lot about how weird children can behave, because both of us didn't want it to be like a caricature of an adult acting like what you think is a child," she explains. This approach captures something essential about childhood's unfiltered nature: "If you take a human being and you take out all the rules of a society, it's a little bit like a kid. They climb everywhere, they go upside down, and they have a way to look at things that is very innocent, but almost like an animal."

Fortuné's personal journey into motherhood paralleled the film's creation: "When I was working on developing the script, I was trying to get pregnant. Then during prep and raising finance, I got pregnant, and I got my child. She was one and a half years old on set." This experience transformed her understanding of parenthood: "I discovered how humble raising a kid makes you, because you kind of learn with them. You think that you have so many things that you're so sure about. They make you so unsure about them."

This revelation offers a counterpoint to certainty: the very quality that enables both authoritarianism and environmental destruction. "Kids don't listen to what you say. They listen to how you act when you say it. So when you say, 'Don't scream' and you're screaming, they understand, 'Okay, scream.'" It forces a kind of unlearning: "It makes you kind of unlearn a lot of things about you and behave differently and be more patient. It makes you more humble."

The film itself became therapeutic, even if Fortuné didn't fully recognize this until seeing it with loved ones: "When I did the first screening in France, in Paris, with all of my friends and family... I felt quite emotional, because I could understand how much of my life and the struggling of going into the process, I put into it. I think the fact that it comes out of you is healing the struggle."

Fortuné's film doesn't offer easy solutions to our cascading crises. Instead, it identifies our willing participation: "I just want them to really face the decisions we are making," she explains, "because I think that most of the time we are not. Just to keep questioning and not just follow everything that the state or the society is telling us to do."

This questioning comes with responsibility: "We have the power to make our own decisions, but it means that we are responsible for those decisions as well. Because most of the time, people say, 'Oh, it's not my fault. What can I do?'"

When asked what defines good parenting in uncertain times, Fortuné offers wisdom that transcends the personal: "Being humble and really listening to your child, which doesn't mean you don't have to give a frame because they need a frame. But a good parent is when you really look at your child and really listen to what they have to say and to how they struggle. The innocence of a child is really great, and we lose that innocence later." This innocence, the capacity to see systems clearly, to question rather than accept, might be what saves us from the future her film portrays.

The Assessment can’t be reduced to a commentary on our world; it’s more of a byproduct of the societies we inhabit, asking not what dystopia we're creating, but whether we're willing to call out the one we already inhabit.