Adapting the remarkable story of Didier Eribon, Jean-Gabriel Périot tells the painful and political story of the workers of France, thanks to an abundant montage of archives linking the intimate to the collective and the voice of Adèle Haenel. To be discovered on Tuesday 23 November at 8:50 p.m. on ARTE.
How to wear on screen Back to Reims (Fayard, 2009) – also the subject of a theatrical adaptation of Thomas Ostermeier in 2019 -, the masterful and cutting edge bestseller of Didier Eribon, autobiographical and sociological tale willingly passing from one temporality to another?
Jean-Gabriel Périot (German youth) restored the chronology and took as a common thread the history of the working class, focusing on the trajectories of the author’s parents, especially his mother. Placed in the Hospice de la Charité when her own mother left to work in Germany after the defeat of 1940, she had to give up becoming a teacher. Forced by the institution to go to work after completing her studies certificate, she became a domestic worker, a profession tacitly subjected to harassment from the masters of the house, and married a worker. “The laws of social endogamy are as strong as those of school reproduction, and closely linked to it”, will write Didier Eribon, about their meeting at a popular ball.
Physical violence of exploitation
Just as the philosopher and sociologist intertwines his family history and that of French society, Jean-Gabriel Périot, by a remarkable weaving of archives and a sensitive montage, amplifies the scope of the story by giving it a thousand faces, those of the poor workers, workers and housekeepers of the 1950s, in turn “reassembled” or resigned, flush -the bowl of “yellow vests” mentioned in the combative epilogue of the film.
News images, testimonies, extracts from documentaries, melodramas or realistic films are superimposed on the “fragments” of the work, incisive prose read with a beautiful sobriety by Adele Haenel.
A report on the young workers of the Boulogne-sur-Mer canneries, who toil 9 to 12 hours a day “with their feet in the water and their hands in the ice”, or a cramped family in a furnished room show the concrete repercussions, the physical violence of the exploitation, echoing the cabinetmaker grandfather of Didier Eribon, “who literally killed himself on the job”.
The film also highlights exclusion mechanisms so deeply rooted that they become automatic, through the testimonies of young people who have given up on their own studies and joined the factory at the age of 14, an age that marked the time. the end of compulsory school.
News images retracing the rise of the National Front finally illustrate one of the centerpieces of the book: the idea according to which the working-class world, no longer feeling represented by the left, has turned away from the Communist Party to reform itself. surreptitiously behind Jean-Marie Le Pen and his far-right ideas, the last resort to defend his collective identity.
A painful and fascinating story, which brings back with force a workers’ world supposedly dissolved in the great bath of capitalism, and its corollary, the class struggle.
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