(Berlin) Christine Angot has decided to film the truth. Not their own truth, but the truth itself. His documentary “A Family,” which will be shown on Saturday in the “Encounters” section of the 74th Berlinale, gives the expression “cinéma-verite” its full meaning.
Published yesterday at 8:44 p.m.
Revealed by L'inceste in 1999 at the age of 40, the writer returns in the novel Le voyage dans l'Est, Prix Médicis 2021 to the repeated rapes she suffered since she was 13, since she met her father For the first time during a trip to Strasbourg.
The film adaptations of “A Family” that will be made in 2021 represent, in a sense, a visual complement to the novel. It begins in Strasbourg, the painful memories of which stir Christine Angot. After unanswered calls from her late father's wife, she decides to go to her house unannounced. We see the author hesitate, then ring the doorbell and literally break down the door as her father's widow denies her entry with cameras.
She needed witnesses, needed support, she told him, screaming, after pushing her a bit. We almost feel sorry for this octogenarian who was attacked. She tries to defend herself as best she can – she didn't know, she was supportive, she couldn't confront her husband who had Alzheimer's, she believed since it was a novel that there was truth and untruth in it. Christine Angot makes him pay a hundred times more for every clumsy word and every ambiguous sentence.
That's the greatest strength of this documentary: it doesn't sugarcoat anything. Neither outbursts of anger nor verbal or physical violence.
In this production, Christine Angot never plays the good part. She doesn't try to seem sympathetic, quite the opposite. Furthermore, she never sought to please the intelligentsia, the public, her readers or publishers.
PHOTO STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVE
Christine Angot
It also puts us viewers in a tricky and uncomfortable position. Pity for an old lady who closed her eyes and looked away, who didn't show compassion for years because she seems to make amends to the cameras once she knows she's being filmed. It is she, let's just say, who is being attacked using dubious methods by this documentary filmmaker who has waylaid her and who won't let her explain. And we forget who the real victim is in this story.
We find it unfair that the novelist criticizes her mother for being hurt because their relationship was broken at the beginning of puberty by this incest that Christine Angot kept secret until adulthood. Even if we understand that it's because she herself is broken. She finds it hard to blame her ex-husband for not coming to her aid when he suspected the rapes had started again when she was in her mid-twenties. Even if we understand that the power mechanisms of incest do not disappear after childhood.
In “A Family,” Christine Angot puts everyone around her in the dock with her accusatory camera. It no longer tolerates complacency and indolence, euphemisms and weak excuses. Nor does she tolerate the bawdy jokes of misogynistic presenters like Thierry Ardisson (we see her leaving the set of Tout le monde en parole français in 2000). She's angry at almost everyone – except her emotional daughter – and she's right to be. Because we don't protect incest victims. Nobody does it. Neither loved ones, nor families, nor villages, nor the state.
The victims are left to fend for themselves while those around them are stunned, or pretend to be, the day the secret is revealed. I never saw anything, I couldn't guess, he never did anything, etc. And then he was a very respected man in the community (like Neige Sinno's father-in-law in his poignant story “Sad Tiger”).
The filmmaker uses photos and videos to trace the storyline. Thanks to her off-camera narration, we understand that her half-brother and sister always claimed that she fantasized about her father's incestuous relationships. And thanks to the editing, we later understand to what extent Christine Angot's father's wife was hypocritical in front of the cameras. As soon as she turned away, she filed a complaint against the writer, particularly for assault. She's shaking with anger as she leaves him a message on his voicemail. “I will kill her,” she said.
After her anger gave way to doubt, she admits that she was aggressive, even violent, during a frank and interesting conversation with her lawyer. People who have remained silent should not now call themselves victims, he pleads. It's straight cinema. In its most destabilizing, unpleasant and impactful form. And in its most authentic form.
A funny assayas
French cinema was in the spotlight at the Berlinale on Saturday. “Hors du temps” by Olivier Assayas was presented in the competition. An autobiographical fiction that Truffaut would not have rejected, narrated by the monotonous and trembling voice of the filmmaker of Destinées sentimentales, reminiscent of that of Vincent Delerm singing Fanny Ardant and me.
PHOTO CAROLE BETHUEL, PROVIDED BY BERLINALE
Micha Lescot and Vincent Macaigne in Out of Time
Out of Time is an isolation film. The story of two brothers who sought refuge in the family country home with their respective partners at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Assayas did this with his brother Michka, a radio presenter and rock music critic.
In Hors du temps they are rather called Étienne and Paul, but in his literary, poetic and slightly different narrative from the story he is directing, Assayas refers to his own career as a filmmaker (Irma Vep, the influence of the Nabis, etc.) . It is Vincent Macaigne, a subscriber to tragicomic roles, who plays Étienne, Olivier's alter ego. And in fact, “Out of Time,” with its pearls of self-deprecation, is perhaps Assayas’ funniest film.
PHOTO JOHN MACDOUGALL, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Olivier Assayas
There is a touch of nostalgia in this film, which evokes childhood, the weight of the parents' cultural heritage (the books that the writer's father bound in Italy are on the shelves), but also the fraternal relationship. The Assayas brothers grew up together, worked in the same fields – Olivier started out as a critic at Cahiers du cinéma – but shaped their own careers. Have they become strangers to each other? What is certain is that after three months in prison they are getting on each other's nerves…
Despite his brother's admonitions, Étienne makes compulsive purchases on Amazon. He is completely obsessed with health regulations. He washes his hands very carefully, carefully following the tutorials on YouTube after putting all his clothes in the wash. All because he just picked up his order in the grocery store parking lot, masked and gloved. On the other hand, he says he is “mentally not ready for the bakery”!
His brother (Micha Lescot), the rock critic who needs freedom, is deeply irritated by what he calls a neurosis, namely his constant cooking of pancakes.
Fortunately, there are also moments of complicity. Meals on the terrace, guessing who is singing which song and reconnecting in the shared love of music.
“There is nothing that gives me hope at the moment,” says Étienne in an interview (Macaigne adopts Assayas’ drawl), but is aware of his privilege of being confined to the bourgeois comfort of a country house and this “stopped time” to enjoy “.
He is a scholar who quotes poetry from memory but claims in an interview with France Culture that he read a Japanese book “because it feels good,” something his partner gently reproaches him for. We happily find the Franco-French cinema of Assayas, that of Cold Water, at the end of August, beginning of September, to May. A simple but irresistible comedy that inevitably reminds us of the people around us during the pandemic.
There are clichés that won't go away
PHOTO KIMBERLEY ROSS, PROVIDED BY BERLINALE
Renate Reinsve in Another End by Piero Messina
At the end of the press screening of Another End, which was also shown in competition, many festival goers spontaneously burst into laughter. Because this film by the Italian Piero Messina, starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Renate Reinsve and Bérénice Bejo, never stops revealing predictable blows. Set in a more or less near future, this science fiction drama imagines a technology that allows the memory of a deceased person to be implanted into a donor's body at short notice. A way to say goodbye more peacefully. In addition, Sal (Gael Garcia Bernal) is convinced by his sister (Bérénice Bejo) to revive the memory of his wife Zoé in the body of Ava (Renate Reinsve). The opportunity to see the Norwegian actress from Joachim Trier's The Worst Man in the World naked in a director's second film in competition in two days. This shows that there are clichés that are not lost in the cinema.