The relationship between Alexandre Farel and Mila Wizman

Alexandre Farel and Mila Wizman are connected first through their parents’ relationship and then through an encounter at a party that becomes the central accusation in Alexandre’s criminal case. Their relationship moves from awkward, parent-arranged proximity to a disputed sexual encounter, a public accusation, and a later confrontation that leads to Alexandre’s imprisonment. The novel preserves the distance between the legal dispute and Mila’s experience of what happened, while showing how their families’ choices and the surrounding social climate shape the consequences for both.

Family Background and First Meeting

Mila is the daughter of Adam Wizman, who has begun a relationship with Alexandre’s mother, Claire Farel. When Alexandre visits Claire and Adam’s apartment on the avenue des Gobelins, it is his first time there. Mila, who has come to Paris from the United States, occupies a bedroom in the family’s two-bedroom home, sometimes sharing it with her younger sister when the girl visits their father. During the visit, Mila sits in a gray felt armchair while Alexandre takes the sofa nearby. Their first interaction is constrained by the adults’ new household: Adam asks Alexandre about Stanford, and Claire explains that Mila may return to the United States after school to attend film school in New York.

Alexandre’s outward response to Mila’s possible plans is polite, but the narration makes clear that he is performing ease rather than feeling it. He resents being placed in a domestic arrangement with people he barely knows and imagines the adults’ love as having imposed a new family on them without regard for whether its members might ever care for one another. When Claire suggests that Mila accompany him to a party, the decision again comes from the parents. Alexandre privately regards Mila as uninteresting and wonders how he will arrive with her; the invitation is less the beginning of a freely chosen courtship than another consequence of the family’s reshuffling.

That reshuffling has a wider religious and familial context. Mila’s mother, Valérie Berdah, has become more observant, taken the name Sarah, and moved toward stricter religious practice. Mila cannot tolerate the restrictions imposed on her life in New York and comes to live with her father in France. She later describes the rupture between her parents and her own guilt: her mother tells her that the events would not have happened had Mila stayed in the United States. Valérie is visiting Paris when the encounter occurs, a circumstance that makes the family’s separation and Mila’s departure part of the immediate background to the case.

The Party and the Encounter

At the party, the social environment is organized around a degrading game directed at women. Rémi Vidal, an engineering graduate who had created a website ranking girls and circulating information about their sexual lives, is identified as the person who initiated the activity. The men select Mila as Alexandre’s designated partner for the game. Alexandre does not tell the group that she is the daughter of his mother’s partner, and no one appears to notice that he arrived with her. His silence leaves Mila exposed to a situation whose terms are set by the group rather than explained to her.

Mila is described as reserved and out of place among the partygoers. She holds a glass of water and initially says that she does not drink alcohol that is not kosher. Alexandre presses her to drink champagne. When she feels unwell and wants air, he accompanies her outside, following his father’s instruction to look after her. The contrast between that instruction and what follows is central to the relationship: Alexandre has been given responsibility for Mila, but his later choices do not amount to the care the instruction implies.

Near the Anvers metro station, Alexandre buys cannabis and cocaine. After Mila refuses to smoke in a park, he calls her timid and takes her to a building’s utility room known to the dealer. There, they use drugs; Alexandre kisses her and asks for oral sex, and they have sexual intercourse. The narration gives the sequence in the context of the party’s game and the substances involved, not as an uncomplicated romantic encounter. On leaving, Alexandre tells Mila that the encounter was part of a hazing ritual. She cries. He becomes frightened by her distress, leaves her in the street, and returns to the party with her underwear in his pocket.

Back at the apartment, Alexandre drinks, dances, and sits with his friends before a disagreement about technology-company salaries turns the conversation sour. He eventually leaves by taxi, preoccupied by the encounter. He cannot clearly remember its course and wonders whether drugs and alcohol made him forceful or brutal. He tries to tell himself that he was not in his normal state and that the encounter should not have happened, but Mila’s crying remains in his thoughts. His immediate response is uncertainty and avoidance rather than a direct attempt to repair the harm or understand what Mila experienced.

The Accusation and Divergent Accounts

The case reaches the press when Agence France-Presse reports that Alexandre, Jean Farel’s son, is suspected of rape and has been taken into police custody. Alexandre’s lawyer, Maître Célérier, publicly rejects the accusation and describes the encounter as something that ordinarily happens between two consenting people. That statement establishes the defense’s account, not a shared understanding between Alexandre and Mila. The novel sets the lawyer’s concise public framing against the earlier account of Mila’s distress and Alexandre’s own uncertainty after the party.

The timing intensifies the public consequences. The Weinstein scandal has recently brought widespread attention to allegations of sexual abuse and encouraged many women to speak publicly about assault and harassment. In that climate, the Farel case becomes highly publicized. Maître Célérier fears that public opinion has already condemned his client before trial. The competing pressures are not treated as substitutes for the underlying question of what happened: the defense invokes consent and the presumption of innocence, while the wider social moment makes it harder for allegations to be contained within private or strictly procedural boundaries.

Reunion, Imprisonment, and Lasting Consequences

Five months before the trial, Alexandre receives a summons. During the intervening period, he encounters Mila by chance along the Saint-Martin Canal. He approaches her unexpectedly. She screams and tries to get away; he becomes aggressive, catches up with her, takes her by the shoulders, and shakes her in an effort to calm her. Passersby call the police. Alexandre is arrested, his judicial supervision is revoked, and he is imprisoned at Fresnes. The episode is not a reconciliation: it renews Mila’s fear and changes Alexandre’s legal status, turning an approaching trial into pretrial detention.

In prison, Alexandre is vulnerable to abuse because other prisoners target men accused of sexual assault. The narrative describes his subsequent decline in that setting, linking the consequences of the canal encounter to the loss of his conditional freedom. Mila’s position is also shaped by the case’s public and familial repercussions. Her mother’s repeated claim that Mila would have been safe had she stayed in the United States compounds the guilt Mila already feels over her parents’ separation. The encounter thus remains entangled with an earlier family rupture rather than confined to the two young people involved.

At the trial’s conclusion, the defense argues that the media has already destroyed Alexandre’s prospects: it says no university will accept him and that a search for his name associates him with the label of rapist. Those claims present the defense’s account of reputational damage, not a neutral measure of every consequence. After the verdict is announced, Jean shows no visible emotion, speaks briefly with his son, and leaves without comment, while women demonstrate outside and one tells a journalist that justice has not been done. Alexandre and Mila’s relationship therefore ends in public division rather than mutual resolution. Its significance lies in the novel’s sustained separation of family-imposed proximity, sexual consent, private distress, competing legal claims, and the judgments imposed by media and society.