It is a bold choice made by France Télévisions by broadcasting, in the first part of the evening, the adaptation of the novel by Michel Houellebecq Elementary particles , released in 1998 by Flammarion, where sex is omnipresent.
Directed by Antoine Garceau (Ten percent) and script, Gilles Taurand, a great accomplice of Téchiné. “You feel a certain form of vertigo when tackling such a work… Surely because what is completely natural in a novel is not necessarily so in an adaptation. And one of the first difficulties I had faced was to contain in two times 60 minutes what happens in the novel from 1950 to the dawn of the third millennium. Initially, we had dreamed of six episodes, then it became three. And then, we had to go to two for budget reasons. So before filming, we, with the director, carried out a sort of quasi-surgical operation dismantling, reassembling, cutting passages from the book. argues Gilles Taurand, screenwriter of the TV movie.
“Adapting is necessarily betraying the author. I fully claim the position of the traitor. What is needed is to find the right traitor. Was I the right traitor? I don’t know. But in any case, the fidelity that only gives rise to an illustration of the novel has no interest.”
Gilles Taurandon franceinfo
Elementary particles follows the journey of two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno. The first is a scientific genius, asexual, unable to show emotions. The second is a sex-obsessed scholar. Their mother was a permissive, depressive, selfish woman, who plunged them into emotional misery.
In the book, raw sex scenes are legion. They are suggested more in fiction, public service in prime time obliges. “However, I don’t have the feeling or the memory of having particularly censored myself. Because what interested me was not so much the concrete representation of the sexual scenes as the consequences of the trauma in one like in the other. So there are a number of scenes that are sexualized. Besides, I had no desire to make fun of their drama, as Houellebecq does. If I had contented myself with making these two characters, very touching in my eyes and very antihero, two laboratory animals, I think I would not have provoked what I hope will become empathy on the part of the viewer.” comments Gilles Taurand.
Michel Houellebecq did not follow the project, and this is not without displeasing Gilles Taurand: “He left me completely free. Would he have had the inclination to adapt measures that I would have refused! The freedom of a screenwriter is that the author has no right of inspection. Maybe one day he’ll let me know what he thinks.”