The French writer revealed by Incest (1999) felt alone for a long time. First as a teenager, when she couldn’t find the words to tell her mother that her father had been raping her since she was 13 years old. Then, in her writing process, where she remembered the atrocities she had experienced, and on television sets, where she was often humiliated, long before the #MeToo movement.
With A family, her very first film, Christine Angot breaks loneliness on all levels. She talks about writing her latest book, The journey to the East (2021), gives voice to the members of her family who were affected by the incest of which she was a victim, and confronts the hypocrisy of her mother-in-law, as well as the journalists who betrayed her, with the truth of his images.
“I turned to cinema so that people could finally see the same thing as me,” summarizes the writer, in an interview the day after the premiere of the film, out of competition, at the Berlinale. “I also wanted to broaden my point of view. […] The words of victims of sexual assault are important, but today, they interest me less than those of others, which reveal even more things. »
“It was a war scene”
If the testimony of his mother-in-law (the widow of his late father), Caroline, who opens the documentary, reveals anything, it is that incest is so sordid that we invent all kinds of stories to explain it to yourself, so as not to see it.
For several years, Christine Angot tried, in vain, to contact the woman who was the wife of her executioner. “I don’t know if it would be possible, one day, to talk to each other before we all disappear, but I think it would be a good thing,” she said one day on her voicemail. She sought to understand how this woman was able to continue living with her father after incest was denounced in his books, or how she managed not to realize it at the time.
Still without a response, therefore, the author invites herself to the octogenarian’s house by force. Passing through Strasbourg, her father’s city where Caroline still lives, she takes the opportunity to visit him with a film crew. To her surprise, her mother-in-law opens the door for her, but she refuses to speak in front of the cameras. Furious, Angot imposes the presence of her team on him and confronts him. She reproaches him for having looked away, for not having believed in what she wrote in her books. We witness, amazed, this eminently emotional and completely spontaneous moment. “It was a war scene,” says the writer.
A few weeks later, Caroline filed a complaint against her for assault and invasion of privacy. The height of hypocrisy, when she said she “felt sorry” for her interlocutor at the time of filming. “It was from our meeting with her that we decided to give the floor to other speakers, to demonstrate the extent to which people tell stories when they do not know how to approach difficult situations. »
“Things have changed a lot”
Angot therefore questions her mother, Rachel, her ex-husband, Claude, and her daughter, Léonore. The testimonies are interspersed with archive images, most of which were shot in the 1990s by Claude, on which extracts from the Journey to the East read by Angot. The film thus becomes a witness to the passing of time, to the narrator’s changing outlook on her past.
One stock sequence is particularly violent in this regard. The writer was ridiculed on a Thierry Ardisson show twice, in 1999 and 2000. Faced with misogynistic comments from the guests, on her second appearance, she became indignant and left the set.
“Things have changed a lot since then”, notably thanks to the #MeToo movement, agrees Christine Angot. ” With The journey to the EastI really felt the criticism behind me”, unlike at the time of the release of Incest. When asked if she thinks she has opened the way for younger authors like Neige Sinno, she does not dare answer for them. But she admits that “literature helps victims to feel legitimized and allows them to create a language to address seemingly new situations.”
“Contrary to what one might think, however, one does not write to heal. It was psychoanalysis that helped me the most, for several years.” Psychoanalysis, certainly, and the love of those around him. The film ends with a touching conversation with his daughter where she says this sentence “that makes all the difference”: “I’m sorry you went through that. »
Olivier Du Ruisseau is staying in Berlin thanks to the support of the Berlinale and Telefilm Canada.