Khédidja is a housekeeper for a wealthy Parisian family. When her bosses offer to continue working for them during the summer they plan to spend in Corsica, Khédidja accepts, but not without apprehension. Fifteen years earlier, this black woman had to leave the place with her two daughters, Jessica and Farah, after the sudden death of her white partner. Now a teenager and a very young woman, respectively, Jessica and Farah intend to enjoy the sun, the beach, meetings, between transgressions and romantic discoveries. At the same time, their mother tries to make peace with a painful past. A year after its controversial appearance in competition at Cannes, The returnby Catherine Corsini, is released here.
For the record, an investigation had been opened regarding a masturbation scene involving a minor. The passage in question does not appear in the film, and Catherine Corsini and her producer Elisabeth Perez have denied the information that has circulated, mentioning in The world a “background of misogyny”.
The main interested party, the young actress Esther Gohourou, who plays Farah, also refuted the allegations, regretting that we had “extrapolated” and “spoken for her”. End of preamble.
This twelfth feature film for cinema from the director of The new Eve, Repetition And Leave is perhaps, in terms of themes and certain key passages, Catherine Corsini’s most personal.
“It all goes back to this emotion that I felt, at 15, when I returned to the house where my father had lived, who died when I was barely two and a half years old,” confides the filmmaker we met at the fall 2023 at Cinemania.
“That evening, I started crying, to my great astonishment, when my aunt told me about him. It’s because she painted me a portrait of him that I didn’t know. I had several images like that in me; archaic images, if I may say so, that I wanted to revive in a film. With my co-writer Naïla Guiguet, we therefore made a mix between these first images, very strong, which inhabited me. »
The role of Khédidja was written for Aïssatou Diallo Sagna, César for best supporting actress for The divide, Catherine Corsini’s previous film. Moreover, the first name Khédidja is that of Naïla Guiguet’s mother, who is of Senegalese origin.
To continue the filmmaker, her childhood haunted her, as did this rediscovered father figure a posteriori.
“That’s how I learned that my father wanted to do cinema, wanted to do theater… He left me a trunk that I discovered when I was eight, in which he had stored his poems, his theater programs, his pieces, and lists of films that he had seen and about which he had written in detail, with this calligraphy like we no longer see… All of this, this transmission, I wanted to bring it back to life as well. But not in a tearful period film, or overtly autobiographical: I wanted to integrate these very personal things into a current story, a story of identity. A story that would tell both my youth and the youth of today. »
Ode to Corsica
Consistent with her approach, Catherine Corsini immediately imagined an intimate staging.
“I wanted a film that wasn’t at all me-as-tu-vu, not at all hyped… That’s why the selection at Cannes surprised me, because it’s a very small film, very everyday. I wanted to remain very close to the characters, their experiences, their torments, their deliverances…”
Another characteristic of the film on which the director decided from the outset was the geographical context: Corsica.
“I wanted to show Corsica in all its paradoxes: its idyllic panoramas with the sea, the beach, the very welcoming side, but also its dry and sharp, rocky landscapes, conducive to mysteries and secrets. It’s a film about sun, skin, sensations, vacations… It’s a film about this summer when something will change in your life: the summer you will always remember. »
This region was very important in the eyes of the filmmaker, because it was directly linked to this past that she intended to revisit.
“Returning to Corsica also meant confronting something that has always been, for me, complicated to say, to admit: my homosexuality. It took me a long time to access my own sexuality, and now that I’m completely liberated, I want to talk about it in a very simple way. »
In this, the character of the studious Jessica (Suzy Bemba) is a bit like the alter ego of the filmmaker, who specifies:
“My cinema shows my journey. My previous films have always been populated by heterosexual women who have character, who fight constantly, against everything, against themselves. Then I talked about a gay boy. Then, I talked about women who have homosexual friends… Finally, I created heroines who have homosexual love stories that are initially thwarted, and finally, accepted, free. »
In this case, there are echoes of this liberation of the filmmaker even in her technical choices.
“You know, this is only the second film where I opted for the hand-held camera, a technique that I banned for a long time. But here it is: it fits with this new freedom, without constraints, and what’s more, it allows me to always be as close as possible to the actresses; to accompany their movements and to capture the wonderful unexpected events that sometimes arise. »
Contrasting sisters
Surprisingly, knowing all this, the character of Jessica only arrived last within the female trio at the heart of the film.
“The daredevil sister, Farah, came shortly after the mother, but she was more subdued. And then, with Naïla, we noticed that something that is interesting in our respective families is this opposition between two sisters: the one who succeeds, who is the model and the pride of everyone, and the one who has no no space, because the first one fills all the boxes. This one is built alongside, doing stupid things, because it has to find another path. Except that they both suffer: the youngest, from not being seen and considered, and the eldest, from suffering the enormous pressure of having to realize dreams that are not necessarily hers. At the same time, the mother loves her two daughters the same, but when you’re young, you don’t see it. »
More than the Cannes red carpet, what left a lasting impression on Catherine Corsini was the premiere of the film in Corsica.
“When I went to present it there, a woman came to see me, after the screening, and spoke to me about her family: her father was black and her mother, white, the opposite of the film, but he was died in similar circumstances. Other people came to tell me how this element, or that element, had resonated intimately with them… And that delighted me, because it was proof that lots of people recognized themselves in this story, which had nevertheless begun in very intimate memories and impressions. »
The film The return hits theaters on May 10.