From Christine Angot, what is best known is not necessarily her books, but she is a writer. What comes to mind immediately is her so particular phrase, her repeated knocks when she was a columnist at Laurent Ruquier and, of course, her personal story. For incest, if he is the title of his seventh novel, irrigates all his work... And happens to be the central theme of the master documentary Family. Her very first film, which she came to present to the public (conquis) of Real Visions in Switzerland.
Travel to the East
Her latest novel, Travel in the Eastfocus on the incest theme of which she was the victim. Prize Medicis, the writer seems to be finally rewarded for her literary work, she who has so often been subject to criticisms, so much at The Mask and the Plum than in more general television programmes. When she is invited to Strasbourg to promote this book, it is mainly in the city where she first met her father who is now dead that she is going. She was hardly more than thirteen years old when she began to rape her for many years.
Accompanied by a small and feminine team, Christine Angot then goes knocking at the doors of those who knew but never spoke. Her old mother-in-law, her own breeder, her ex-husband,... All march in front of the camera and express themselves, as well as evil. The anatomy of a relationship of tentacular domination then unfolds in front of the objective, imposing an inclining silence on atrocities that took place however before their eyes all...
Pushing doors...
Bowie's effigy T-shirt, a glamorous look in front of a full room, applause that sternizes, Christine Angot is warmly welcomed to present her first documentary which she projects before the audience of Real Visions Nyon, Switzerland. A room that probably doesn't fully know what's waiting for it and that will come out groggy of a hard session, as emotionally as emotionally moving.
And it must be said that the documentary goes on the wheel hats... For if a brief introduction puts Christine Angot in her office – a reassuring place, a cocoon of security – we will soon follow her "travel to the East" as she says, or rather her return to the land where the incest of which she was the victim was born. And just as quickly, she will decide to go knock at the door of the house where everything went.
Documentary break-in
While the house is still haunted by the spectre of a dead father today and the atrocities she suffered, Christine Angot hesitates to ring at the door of her incestuous father's widow. The tension electrifies the air, hesitating the writer. With Caroline Champetier and Inès Tabarin holding the cameras, she will end up shaking, pressing the button of the bell. Then the sizzling voice of this widow, probably the most tenuous link that still connects her to her executioner, was used by the interphone.
Then begins in the film a scene of barely incredible intensity, where the foot in the door incarnates both in the proper sense and in the figurative. The foot in the door of a throbbing of secrets, unsaid, violent euphemisms and implied bastards. An uncomfortable scene, which is not a settlement of account but a challenge to the fait accompli: you knew, you never did anything, why? The question is simple. The act is life-saving but terrifying, uncomfortable, malaising. The answers are even more so. The spectator then finds himself projected in these family secrets that everyone would want to forget, but that Christine Angot convokes without detours.
Everybody talk about it?
And if the documentary is composed around these major and long sequences of face-to-face interviews, another segment will mark at least as strongly the viewer. Flashback: we meet in 2000 on Thierry Ardisson's stage, where Angot defends his book Leave town. The writer then finds herself in the crossfire of columnists, guests and animator, in a flood of violence that blooms well the old world wishing body and soul to defend herself against this woman openly assuming the incest of which she was the victim. Decredible, publicly humiliated, she will be forced to leave the set...
Not so surprising coming from the "man in black" who, a few years earlier, joked alongside Frédéric Beigbeder and Gabriel Matzneff (a notorious pedophile who had his towel round on all TV sets, on this subject see the recent Consent) about "sleeping with 12-year-olds"... More amazing? That a president of the republic, barely the documentary d'Angot came out, decides to decorate this same Ardisson with a legion of honor. Doubtful timing, doubling with the presidential reaction to the Depardieu case, which seems to confirm a variable geometry interest (or total disaffection) for the cause of women...
No, definitely, the old world is tenacious and misogyny twists. A beautiful slap, as she herself describes Angot in her published in Release, but a hope all the same: this sequence of the show of Ardisson passed without problems in the 2000s is barely bearable today. The proof, at least, that our eyes have changed a little...
Powerful documentary
The film ends in the most beautiful way and its bursting violence finds a certain appeasement in the ultimate discussion, as salutary as it is moving. Anyway, Family is an exciting film by what he reveals of the annihilating mechanics of domination, upsetting from one side to the other, and an act of absolute courage on the part of the one that was so dragged into the mud because she was one of the few to dare talk about what she had experienced. To put words on the horror she had suffered. Dooser shake a social body preferring to look away than to face a much more common evil than we think...
After the huge Sad Tiger Snow's Sinno (last year's great literary crush), this is a powerful new work about incest. And the opportunity to have a little hope in the face of a word that seems to finally, a little, to be released... Talking about "this social crime that concerns us all", is in her own words the desire of Christine Angot who makes it brilliantly with this film and gives us decidedly want to discover her books.
[…] Après Une Famille sur une toute autre thématique, voilà le second documentaire coup de poing de cette cuvée 2024 du festival suisse Visions du Réel. No Other Land y repartira d’ailleurs auréolé d’un prix du public, lui qui avait déjà été sacré meilleur documentaire lors de la dernière éditions de la Berlinale… Retour sur un film hors-norme et bien évidemment brûlant d’actualité. […]