Christine Angot knocks on the doors of her past marked by incest in a moving documentary film

Twenty-five years later Incestand several books devoted to this subject, such as An impossible love(Flammarion, 2015), or The Journey to the East (Flammarion, 2021), Christine Angot returns this time to this question with a documentary film, A familyin theaters March 20, 2024.

In 2021, for the promotion of his book The journey to the East. Christine Angot must go to Nancy, Metz and Strasbourg. Strasbourg is the city where she was raped as a teenager by her father. The town where Elisabeth still lives, her mother-in-law, her father’s wife, who died twenty years ago. She then decides to go there with a camera, which will follow her on this journey.

Foot in the door

On September 12, 2021, upon arrival in this city where she met her father for the first time at the age of 13, the city where he began to rape her, emotion overwhelmed her. Tears. Then anger takes over. Christine Angot gets into a taxi. After some hesitation, she presses the doorbell button, puts her foot in the door, and enters her mother-in-law’s house.

The scene that follows is stunning. Chirstine Angot is angry, overwhelmed by emotion. Opposite, his mother-in-law, prancing. After a moment of confrontation, the two women sit in this bourgeois interior, the mother-in-law’s yellow pants matching the canvas hanging behind her back. A woman who reveals herself throughout the conversation incapable of hearing, incapable of saying, incapable of recognizing that she “part of history”.

This is the first strong scene in the film. There will be others: an exchange between Christine Angot and her mother. Another with Claude, her ex-husband. Another with Charly, his companion. And finally a last one, liberating, with his daughter. These scenes are interspersed with extracts from family films, where we see her with her child daughter, with her husband, or writing. These images refer to a past time that continues. They also project without comment another time which has opened up, where motherhood, the family, reinvent themselves despite everything. Images whose meaning unfolds off-camera, available to the viewer.

Here and there, too, archives, photos of childhood, youth, family, with commentary, a television set hosted by Ardisson, which the novelist ends up leaving, sounds, archives of the show The Mask and the Feather, belatedly rehabilitating a writer long despised by critics. So many moments that reveal to what extent during all these years, Christine Angot screamed in the desert. Since then, there have been The big familyby Camille Kouchner, and more recently sad tigerfrom Neige Sinno.

“The sentence that broke my loneliness”

It happens that a camera acts on reality, that it serves at the same time as support, mediator, and liberating agent. Christine Angot revisits through this means the tragedy of which she is the victim, and the camera becomes the tool which allows her to make the protagonists of this endless story hear her feelings, her anger, her pain, that of the rape, that of not not having been heard, that of his solitude. It is this same tool that forces them to listen to him, to hear him, to respond to him.

“A camera is something that accompanies, that supports, that sees the same thing as you do.” explains Christine Angot in the presentation of the film. She adds that the idea of ​​making a film, rather than a book, was born from this “I want there to be a camera in someone’s hand, someone who is there, who sees and hears the same thing as you, who has the same visual, sensory, sensitive and even hyper-sensitive experience”.

The film thus appears as an echo chamber of pain, of anger to be heard and of a desire to hear what others have to say. In this way the film starts out suffocating. Angot does not give up, with remarkable courage. “Talking to each other, before we all disappear, I think that would be a good thing” says the novelist to her mother-in-law at the beginning of the film, in a telephone message. This is basically what the camera makes happen, and it’s heartbreaking.

Thus, over the course of the sequences, and the words spoken by each person, the film moves towards appeasement, which ends with this moving scene: “One day you told me I’m sorry that happened to you”said Christine Angot to her daughter. “It’s the sentence that broke my solitude”, she whispers. We leave them there, the mother and daughter, at the seaside, facing the horizon. A little breeze stirs their hair, the sun lights up their smiles. The family is there.

“I’m tired of talking about incest. I’m tired of my work being invaded by it”, says Christine Angot. With A familyshe questions this question once again, in a more direct way, which brings out and shows a truth, without detours, without filter and without literature.

The sheet :

Gender : documentary
Director: Christine Angot
Country : France
Duration : 1h22 min
Exit : March 20 2024
Distributer : Nour Films

Synopsis : The writer Christine Angot is invited for professional reasons to Strasbourg, where her father lived until his death in 1999. It is the city where she met him for the first time at thirteen, and where he started to rape her. His wife and children still live there. Angot takes a camera and knocks on the family’s doors.