Reading Annie Ernaux in the banlieues

A director, Claire Simon, who is more of an anthropologist with a camera than a documentary filmmaker, and a Nobel Prize winner, Annie Ernaux, who has turned her life into a literary work, legitimising the autobiographical genre. A perfect bond between two women who are generationally close, feminists, poetic 'investigators' of society, who come together in a film, by Claire Simon, Scrivere la vita, which will be screened at the Venice Days of the Venice Film Festival and which the "Sole 24" Ore saw as a preview.

This is not the first time Simon has 'immersed' himself in a school. In 1992, he had observed the relational mechanisms during the nursery school break in Recreations (1992), demonstrating how the same dynamics of pyramidal subjugation are reproduced at a very young age as in adults.
In Cannes, in Learning (2024), he tackled with teachers and pupils of a primary school the significance of inequalities of gender and opportunity and the difficulties of integrating inhabitants of disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Themes and struggles dear to Ernaux's heart. In Writing Life - the name recalls the anthology collection published by Gallimard in 2011 - Simon and Ernaux, devotees of the real, mirror each other through the lens of high school students from different parts of France and its former colonial offshoots, creating a documentary on how Ernaux's literature is received and received by young people. Simon joins the teachers in the debate that follows the reading of the Nobel Prize winner's books, which are studied in France.

These include The Place (2014), The Years (2015), The Other Daughter (2016), The Event (2019), all published by L'orma in Italy, and A Woman's Life (Guanda, 1988). Kicking off the film in a high school in Franconville, in the Parisian banlieue, is a quotation from Il Posto, in which the word 'ass', uttered by the writer's father, highlights the humble origins of Ernaux's family, who ran a small bar and grocery in Normandy. Her father spoke patois and Annie was ashamed of that dialect, although she faithfully reported it in her diary chronicles. The pupils' first comment is on the language, that 'flat' style, that is, direct, sober, slavishly reporting reality, even dragging vernacular vocabulary along with it.

A girl takes the floor and explains that it is the style, adhering to the familiar lexicon, that allows the author to convey the authenticity and intimacy of her relationship with her parents. The passage in the book also provides an opportunity to address issues such as social mobility through study, which allowed Ernaux to 'avenge, by writing, her race'. It then triggers a reflection on the relationship between parents and children and the cultural and generational distance between them. A boy takes the floor and recalls his grandparents, peasants, who fled Portugal under the Franco dictatorship. Their initial difficulty in finding work in France and then adapting by being, his grandmother, a porter and, his grandfather, a truck driver. Another girl reinforces the concept by explaining the impossibility of passing on to her grandparents, who had little schooling.

In Cayenne, capital of French Guiana, a young man refuses to analyse Ernaux, believing that her books are for 'females', especially after reading about the writer's clandestine abortion, recounted in The Event. Prodded by a companion, he explains that he was disturbed by the description and does not in any way want to empathise with a woman who does not want a child. In Sarcelles, still in the Parisian banlieue,Simple Passion (Rizzoli, 1992) triggers a discussion, especially among the girls, about the author's extra-marital affair with a man younger than her. The author's obsessiveness with the object of her passion, in the presence of which her husband and children disappear, and her inability to accept its end, is criticised. The crude description of certain physical practices is seen only as a way of engaging the reader, when, on the contrary, many more important concepts would have deserved more development, such as the father's attempt to kill the mother, liquidated with a sentence.