The Phantom Year
by Didier Tronchet
Dupuis, coll. “Free area”, 192 p., €27
We had left him on a lost island, now we find him at the top of Paris. Neither quite the same, nor quite another. The creator of Jean-Claude Tergal, an award-winning funny series about his alter ego, a sentimental loser in a shapeless down jacket, returns to autofiction to talk about himself. After The Lost Singerthe moving quest of a depressive librarian who has gone in search of a musician from his youth exiled to the other side of the world, Didier Tronchet once again brings his preoccupations and obsessions to the stage.
This time, the author endorses the curved suit of the fashionable comedian, Gilles Collot-Sopiédard. This modern-day Rastignac likes to go to the steps of the Sacré-Coeur every week to have Paris at his feet. The capital buzzes with his latest opinion piece, in the press or on the radio, where he harpoons with a few murderous phrases the vanities of his time. No one is spared, except perhaps his wife, an ornithologist, a stranger to all wickedness and second degree.
So what is behind this famous “ghost year”?
Until the day when the comedy misses its effect, missing the last step of a joke… An unfortunate fall which announces a complete questioning. Because Collot has started therapy to try to understand the sources of his vitriolic humor and his existential crisis. Then begins an investigation in the attic of his memory and his childhood home, from where the photo album of the year 1986 disappeared…
So what is behind this famous “ghost year”? Didier Tronchet is gradually unearthing from the mines that saw him grow up in northern France the missing pieces of his character’s mental puzzle: the feelings of shame of a class defector and family secrets. Screenplay springs that might seem a little worn, but the narrative clockwork is so well regulated that we forgive some predictable cogs. Under the broad strokes of a graphic style close to caricature, hides a real delicacy of the gaze.
With a surprisingly tender sense of derision, the author reveals himself a little more through this new portrait of a character in search of himself. The surprise effect is a little dulled and the emotion is not as intense as in his previous autofiction, but the pleasure is intact to witness the cathartic journey of a comedian who discovers the refreshing candor of sincerity.
