In April 2005, while filming in Nunavik, Philippe Lavalette (The measure of the world. Notebooks of a surveyor filmmakerMarchand de Feuilles, 2011) receives a text message from his brother announcing that their father, a widower since 2002, has climbed out of the window from the sixth floor after having had breakfast in the small kitchen of the Parisian apartment where he has been living since fifty years “Philippe, Christian, forgive me,” he scribbled in his clumsy schoolboy handwriting.
This tragic event was first the starting point for a moving short film, A boy from Paris(2006), where the director of photography, helped by his children, Manuel and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, paid homage to his father through images taken during his walks in the streets of his neighborhood and during his last trip to Canada, country where, very young, he dreamed of settling. “So I’m living his dream when it wasn’t my intention. It’s as if I were the bearer of a desire”, confides the author met at the Duty.
“After making this film about my old dad, he continues, I found that things were missing. So I came up with the idea of rewriting. Besides, I told Mélanie Vincelette, a wonderful publisher, that writing a second novel is like directing a second film: it’s much harder. We put too much in the first and in the second, we repeat ourselves. So the process for this one was longer. »
This time, Philippe Lavalette devotes to his father a novel in the form of post-mortem dialogue, Merchant of four seasonswhich forms a magnificent diptych with Small Magdalene (Marchand de Feuilles, 2017), where he recounted the origins of his maternal grandmother, abandoned at birth and taken into care by the State. “I hadn’t thought of the word ‘diptych’ and that suits me very well, but there won’t be a triptych,” he announces straight away.
From objects found in his father’s pockets, some of which will remain “inaudible” to him, the novelist reconstructs bit by bit the main lines of the destiny of this vegetable merchant brought up by his grandparents after his parents had given up.
“My father was walking in Paris with his Walkman all patched up. He whistled, greeted everyone, picked up everything he found, an old key, a pebble, a screw… He’s done that all his life. The start of the book is what it had in its pockets at the moment of committing suicide, of jumping into the void. Each object has a memory that I can decrypt or not, and when I can decrypt it, I fill in a box. It’s as if I had a dotted life, where there are holes, and in the holes, fiction allows me to reconstruct his life. Jean Echenoz says that the objects are small detonators of fiction. I think fiction is truth. »
Echoes of the past
The family novel of Philippe Lavalette is not without echoing that told by the director Manon Barbeau, his wife, in her documentary The children of Refus global (1998), where she spoke of her parents, the painters Marcel Barbeau and Suzanne Meloche, the very one whose portrait Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette would draw in The leaky woman(Leaf Merchant, 2015).
“The starting matrix is abandonment. On Manon’s side, in an extremely violent way, and it was the same thing on my side for my parents. I did not experience abandonment, but I had the transmission of this suffering, because we carry the suitcases of all those who preceded us. The meeting with Manon is the mysterious binder of a common history, which intersects despite the continents. After the destruction, you have to rebuild, but in my father, there is a terrible gap that you can’t really rebuild. The weight of this abandonment will follow him all his life. »
His father being a man of few words, Philippe Lavalette was fortunately able to count on the research of Gwenaëlle Leprat, the journalist who had found traces of his grandmother in the archives of the Public Assistance. To revive the resistance past of the young Jacques Lavalette, called Valmont in the novel, the historian Michel Alexandre Gauthier (Pocket of Saint-Nazaire. Nine months of a forgotten warGeste editions, 2017) was also of great help to him.
“My father, it is a walled word. Nothing comes out, except every now and then a few snippets. And there, boom! we hang it up, then we ask him for an explanation, but he replies: “It’s old, all that, we don’t talk about it.” Catching little bits of sentences isn’t enough to know what his life has been like. So, I pick up objects and I go to the field, like in the small village where he was baptized at 21, out of love for the resistant Bérénice, whom I invented as a gypsy rather than a Jew, whom he dragged the picture all his life in his wallet. So it’s like an investigation. I call it archeology; in fact, the formula that I have for me is archaeologist of the intimate. »
This archaeological work is also found at the heart of the novel, in the same way as the fragments of the father’s life: “I really liked the idea of this structure alternating between the present and the past. In the form, there are things that can make you think of cinema, like flashbacks. From the beginning, that was it: on one side, there was me, my research; on the other, he, his life. »
It’s not just the flashback construction of the story that evokes the primary profession of the novelist. By his way of describing the action, the decor, the landscapes, the atmosphere, of staging his characters, Philippe Lavalette suggests values of shot, camera movements.
“It’s true that there are things that make you think of a cinematographic syntax. There is a succession of images; these are mental images, but they are almost framed: waist shot, overall shot, traveling, panoramic. It is the whole profile of the filmmaker that emerges there. »
On reading merchant of four–seasons, it is clear that Philippe Lavalette could easily draw a film script from it. “Oh, I wish…because for Little Madeleine, I was told it would cost too much. »
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