Michel Houellebecq and cinema: an original passion

Wednesday’s release of “In the Skin of Blanche Houellebecq” shines a spotlight on Michel Houellebecq’s links with cinema.

Very visual in his writing, a sensor of the spirit of the times, Michel Houellebecq is sometimes identified, rightly or wrongly, with a contemporary Balzac. Spotted in around twenty films, as an actor, director or screenwriter, would he try to verify the adage according to which cinema was born from the meeting of the novel and the painting on an editing table?

Coming from cinema, before being a writer, Michel Houellebecq is visibly a lover of the 7th art, which reflects well on him. And his participation in In the shoes of Blanche Houellebecqa film by Guillaume Nicloux released Wednesday March 13, is one more act in this relationship between the writer and the cinema.

The roots of cinema passion

After Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Houellebecq is undoubtedly the writer who maintains the most links with cinema, as an author, screenwriter, director and actor. Their worlds have nothing to do with each other, but the relationship they have between fiction and cinema brings them together. Another point they have in common: their interest in fantasy. Robbe-Grillet with his films Last year in Marienbad (1961) or I love you I love you (1968), and Houellebecq with his veneration for the American author Howard Philips Lovecraft, to whom he devoted an excellent essay, his first published book.

Director of three short films and one feature, actor in eleven films, screenwriter in many others, Michel Houellebecq regularly introduces cinema into his novels: outings, meetings, posters, screenings, film references… punctuate from afar far away his work. Aware that novelistic and cinematic writing are different, he produced his own adaptation of his novel The possibility of an island At the movie theater. Starring Benoît Magimel, screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008, the film was panned by critics.

Director before being a writer

But Michel Houellebecq’s first foray into cinema dates back to 1978, with the production of the short film (30 mins) Crystal of suffering, written, directed and with Michel Houellebecq, difficult to see today. The novelist is therefore a director before being a novelist. After this first attempt at cinema, the adaptation of his first novel Extension of the field of wrestling (1994) by Philippe Harel was published in 1999. Michel Houellebecq is already a literary phenomenon, and seeing his novel come to life on the screen, five years after its publication, was undoubtedly a consecration for the film buff that he is.

But it is his collaboration with Guillaume Nicloux, director of The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq broadcast on Arte in 2014, which reveals the novelist as an actor. Mood film about the time, around the small-footed kidnapping of the writer who finds himself in the home of a retired couple, it captures an atmosphere and a spirit of the times specific to those that we perceive in his novels .

A cinema “face”

Philippe Harel’s film reveals a silhouette and a “face” as cinema likes them. At the same time recognizable, transparent and very particular, Michel Houellebecq’s aura as a writer is not for nothing either, as he has become a highly sought-after media personality. It is then that the writer plays the leading role of Near Death Experience (2014) by Gustave Kerven and Benoît Delépine, where he is an employee who, after a burnout, gives up and flees to the mountains by bike.

Also a musician, Michel Houellebecq is alongside Iggy Pop in the documentary dedicated to the rock star, Staying Alive – Method. He then made an appearance in Saint-Amour (2016) still directed by Kerven and Delépine, starring Gérard Depardieu, Benoît Poelvoorde and Vincent Lacoste. In 2019 he reunited with Guillaume Nicloux who directed Thalasso, where Houellebecq plays opposite Gérard Depardieux, both playing their own roles. The film follows The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecqand is similar to the seaside chronicle of the two media phenomena which rebel against the dry regime of the establishment.

Faithful directors

The directors are loyal to Michel Houellebecq, like Gustave Kerven and Benoît Delépine, who give him the role of a suicidal client in Clear historywhere he meets Blanche Gardin before finding her today in In the shoes of Blanche Houellebecq. Over the course of his appearances, wouldn’t the writer become a luxury cameo, invited to say “hello” as if he were part of the decor of his faithful directors? But the writer does not allow himself to be confined. Identified with his “offbeat” image, Houellebecq plays where he is least expected, as in Rumba, life (2022), a comedy by Franck Dubosc, where he is a doctor. The same year, his novel Elementary Particles (1998) East adapted for television, but he does not participate in it, whether as writer/adaptor or actor.

But he is really where we expect him in the new film by Guillaume Nicloux, which features him a third time in In the shoes of Blanche Houellebecq. The director finds Michel Houellebecq in an imbroglio of situations both banal and improbable, where he still plays his own role. Surprising to see this identification of the writer with the actor, between solitude of writing and exhibition in the cinema, in the interpretation of “himself”, writer, while he aspired, originally, to be filmmaker. His name even appears in the titles of the films in which he stars. Houellebecq has become a fictional character. A twist of fate that would be worth a novel.