“Bénie be Sixtine” is a TV movie programmed on France 2. A fiction punch adapted from a novel on a young woman who falls into the trap of a toxic marriage.
It is an event TV movie like France Télévisions regularly broadcasts throughout the year to raise awareness of social subjects. Blessed be sixtineprogrammed this Wednesday, February 5, 2025, at 9:05 p.m. on France 2, recounts the journey of a young woman trapped after her marriage to a fundamentalist Catholic. A chilling dive in the heart of a sectarian movement, freely adapted from the novel Punch by Maylis Adhémar, published in August 2020 at Julliar editions.
This 90 -minute shock fiction, produced by Sophie Reine, is an edifying testimony on the long path to the emancipation of a woman under control. In the beginning, we therefore find Sixtine, a pious and wise young woman who meets her future husband during an “old -fashioned” wedding mass. He is the ideal son-in-law, Saint-Cyrian, ras, engaged in a traditionalist religious movement. It is also an “excellent party” that seduces his family.
What Blessed be sixtine ?
But Sixtine will see her life switch after her marriage to Pierre-Louis. Once married, she abandons her studies to devote herself to her home, “as it should be”. Except that the fairy tale turns into a nightmare, then in combat so that Sistine can get out of reactionary religious values and a sectarian lifestyle. Isolated, under the influence of a fundamentalist in-laws which goes so far as to want to “steal” him her child to be born, the young woman suffocates and sees only one outcome: flee to save her skin. His emancipation will be strewn with pitfalls but will allow him to rebuild and flourish, by rejecting this model imposed to kiss life.
Carried by the intense interpretations of Capucine Valmary and Adrien Dewitte in the main roles, Blessed be sixtine will not leave anyone indifferent. Especially since the first very noticed novel by journalist Maylis Adhémar, whose TV movie is inspired, himself based on a true story, that of her own life. Born in 1985 into a traditionalist Catholic family, the author made the poignant story of her slow emancipation of an environment stifling the individual under the weight of prohibitions, control and guilt.
Rare dive into the fundamentalist Catholic bourgeoisie
Beyond an overwhelming individual story, the novel Blessed be sixtine And its adaptation are also a striking and rare dive in an unknown fringe of society: the fundamentalist Catholic bourgeoisie, withdrawn from itself and its values from another time. A world where the woman must remain in her place, submitted to her husband and devoted to her children. Where Vatican II’s refusal rubs shoulders with the hatred of “the foreigner” and everything that deviates from the traditional norm.
By being inspired by his own experience, Maylis Adhémar carries a precious testimony here on the grip mechanisms which brief the individual within radical groups, were they of Catholic obedience. The long and painful emancipation process is admirably restored, “without manichaeism, all in nuances” according to the first criticisms that salute the interpretation of Capucine Valmary, previously seen in UFO (s).
Thus for Télérama, “Sophie Reine’s TV movie (scenario by Zoé Galeron and Dominique Garnier) mainly touches thanks to his contrasting portrait, delicately embodied by Capucine Valmary”. Le Parisien also praised “the luminous Capucine Valmary, barely 23 years old”, who was also rewarded for the Prix du Jeune Espoir Female at the La Rochelle Fiction TV Festival in 2024.