She hesitates, impatience and apprehension mixed, before the entrance to an elegant villa in Strasbourg. To ring, not to ring? To enter, not to enter? Christine Angot, filmed by cinematographer Caroline Champetier, goes there, gets one foot in the door. She enters, despite…
She hesitates, impatience and apprehension mixed, before the entrance to an elegant villa in Strasbourg. To ring, not to ring? To enter, not to enter? Christine Angot, filmed by cinematographer Caroline Champetier, goes there, gets one foot in the door. She enters, despite the protests of the resident of the place: the widow of her father, who died in 1999 and who raped her for years. Since this incest became public, the old lady never wanted to speak with her. The writer confronts her with decades of unsaid things. By forcing the door, she breaks the wall of silence.
The exchange is tense. Her stepmother tries to preserve her fiction, wants to believe she is outside this incest. The novelist protests: “But it happened to you! » A sentence which clearly establishes Christine Angot’s perspective in this first film: incest does not only concern the aggressor and the victim, its chilling waves spread to everyone around them. She interviews each of her loved ones in interviews charged with emotion or anger. Her mother, her ex-husband, her daughter…
Mocked
This documentary draws its strength from this keen search for truth, without possible compromise, which guides the writer, and from the intelligence of its construction. Gradually, the author broadens the spectrum of views, moving from her intimate circle to this abstraction that we call “society”, through the words of a lawyer or broadcasts of program sequences recalling how much, when his book “Incest” was published in 1999his testimony was mocked.
Speech was beginning to be freed (Christine Angot was one of the first to bring this subject into the public sphere), but “listening” remained locked. The extract from an interview, in the early 2000s, by a mocking, even hilarious Thierry Ardisson is unbearable today.
This relentless film ends with a much more generous sequence, a moving dialogue with her daughter, who “saved her”, believes Christine Angot. The best of “a family”.
“A family”, documentary by Christine Angot. Duration: 1 hour 22 minutes. Released this Wednesday, March 20.