Nothing ever happens here navigates between the police investigation and the family drama. What made you want to take this path?
It’s been since my first book, I’m fine, don’t worry, that I hadn’t played with this suspense effect. At the beginning of the book, there is a woman from the village who is found dead. Everyone knows her, everyone is devastated and at the same time, all the local men can be suspicious in some way. There is one side, as the Americans say, whodunnit – that he has done ? Very quickly, suspicion falls on Antoine, who is the central theme of the book. A priori, even if there is always a doubt, the reader is rather in the idea that this is a culprit who is a little too ideal for it to be honest. And one of the driving forces of the book is how he will deal with all that. Afterwards, I believe a lot in something – I’ve experienced it, I’ve written 15 novels, I’ve written films, etc. – is that we build characters, we immerse them in a particular plot, and at a given moment, they have a fatality of their own. And I would be inclined to say that I do not choose; there is something of fate, of destiny. And what’s more, beyond the noir novel aspect, this book really plays with the idea of tragedy almost in the primary sense of the term.
The plot is located in a village in the French Alps, not far from Annecy; the kind of village where everyone knows each other and knows everything about their neighbor. Was this decor essential to build your camera?
It was essential, but I didn’t find it right away. What I wanted was indeed behind closed doors, but a tourist place where there are almost no tourists and where we therefore find ourselves in a sort of private space. At the beginning, I wrote this in Brittany, as I often do, but I quickly realized that the question of the open sea was complicated; I needed to confine my characters even more [rires]. So I had the plot, the journey of the book and its beginning, then I was invited to a literary festival on the banks of Lake Annecy, in Talloires, a very chic and beautiful little village. And there it was obvious: I knew where I was going to place my plot.
As in your previous novel, Under the rosesyou depict troubled and tense family dynamics – rivalry between brothers, a distant relationship between father and son, the sister who plays the role of peacemaker while the mother tries to preserve the unity of the family…
There is a real connection between the two books. First of all, Under the roses is very worked by the theater. And I also pushed it further in this book, particularly with the monologues facing the camera, so to speak, interrogations which resemble little theater monologues. And basically, in the context of an investigation into elements linked to femicide or sexist and sexual violence against women, one of the big questions is that of silence and that of what is said, of what we hear. I’m talking about the words of women: when do we believe them and listen to them. The other link with Under the roses, this is the family model that I work with: we are in a very classic family – three children, two parents –, a somewhat dominant model, we will say, and therefore in itself very representative of something in ultra-patriarchal family structures. And it interests me because it is the laboratory of a society which is itself extremely marked by the question of patriarchy. It is a metaphor for society as a whole.
Was it important for you to address the issue of feminicide in a novel?
I worked on the issue of refugees, the rise in the popular vote for populist and far-right parties, kidnappings between France and Japan… At a given moment, life means that, suddenly, something something hits me somehow more strongly. The #metoo movement, the liberation of speech, still makes society boil and I am surrounded by many women – my daughter, my partner, my friends… And this liberation of speech translates into the impossibility , today, to no longer look things in the face and to no longer question ourselves as a man, even when we think that we are already a relatively deconstructed person. My partner is very involved in an association around feminicides called 125 and after, and my daughter, the reactionaries back home would say that she is a terrible ecofeminist [rires] ! So these are topics that come to me every day from listening to those around me. And I don’t know any woman around me who hasn’t been, at some point in her life, confronted with gender-based or sexual violence.
Nothing ever happens here
Flammarion
361 pages