While the bibliographic career of Michel Houellebecq has never failed to court intrigue, praise, and rancor, his filmed performances have garnered relatively little attention. Perhaps this is owing to their surprising abundance, particularly in recent years. Since 2014, Houellebecq has appeared in seven feature narrative films. Three are collaborations with writer-directors Benoit Delphine and Gustave Kervern: Near Death Experience (2014, in which Houellebecq plays the lead), Saint Amour (2016), and Delete History (2020), a trilogy of sincere dramedies about contemporary French life which are served well by remaining intractably on the screening circuit across the pond. The same could likely be said of Rumba Therapy (2022), a fish-out-of-water story in which the author plays a supporting role, which all the sugar in Réunion could not compel this writer to watch.
Houellebecq’s most famous filmed moments will likely never see the light of day, referring to the infamous KIRAC documentary about his sex life that the author sued out of submission before it could screen publicly. But alongside these peculiar forays, aborted and otherwise, Houellebecq has been engaged in a triptych of filmed self-portraiture with director Guillaume Nicloux. This project has delighted in its three installations in subjecting the body (frequently naked) and the persona (less so) of France’s most notorious author to imaginative and delightful forms of torture, demonstrating over and again Houellebecq’s greatest strength and weakness as screen presence and writer: his irreducibility.
The premises of each film are similarly skeletal. The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (2014) saw its titular lead abducted by three dunderheaded Frenchmen during the writing of The Map and the Territory (2010), and observes as Houellebecq, resolutely nonchalant, by turns frustrates and charms his captors. Thalasso (2019) begins with the author’s real wife, Qianyun Lysis Li, unloading her husband for five days at a health spa in Normandy, where he will meet Gerard Depardieu, a fellow inmate, and be subjected to cryotherapy and all manner of deprivations. Houellebecq, a translucent specimen at the best of times, is rendered corpse-gray by cinematographer Christophe Offenstein’s reality television-grade non-style coverage, and much of the fun derives from watching the author plead and scheme for wine and cigarettes. He prefers to be seated if not supine for most scenes, but Houellebecq has a penchant for the same stubborn improvisation that has lent Larry David his enduring vitality.
Being Blanche Houellebecq (2024), the latest, though by no assurance the final, piece of this puzzle, follows a similar fish-out-of-water design, displacing the author from Paris to the overseas department of Guadalupe. Hosted by the French comedienne Blanche Gardin (playing herself), Houellebecq has arrived in Grande-Terre for the purposes of judging a look-alike contest. This installment has a little more on its mind than its predecessors. As per the title, Being Blanche Houellebecq is concerned with racial politics, more specifically, the post-colonial dynamic in the French colonies. Hideous interstitial scenes use AI-generative imagery to animate historical paintings of revolutionary struggles in the colonies, often introducing dubiously necessary chapter titles. Predictable debates between Houellebecq’s white French cohort — himself, Gardin, and Luc (Luc Schwarz), a kidnapper-turned-confidant from the first film — ensue, over air conditioning, cultural appropriation, and, of course, the inflammatory novels and public persona of Michel Houellebecq.
They fight with the chauffeurs, witness a murder, get arrested, and escape before they can even arrive at the venue, accumulating a certain slapdash slapstick energy that sporadically inflates and deflates the political stakes. “Mais je suis Blanche, monsieur!” Gardin shouts at one point — subtlety is beside the point. After fleeing arrest, the handcuffs attaching Gardin and Houellebecq seem to visualize the “double-bind” of the French colonizer subject position: “Slavery is no small matter,” Gardin argues with a chauffeur unwilling to turn on his air conditioning. “Once we’re done dripping in the car, you’ll feel you’ve avenged your ancestors?” The film persists in this position of both frantic discomfort and total stasis, Houellebecq sweating profusely, offering occasional obscurities in the middle seat.
As opposed to the series’ previous entries, Being Blanche Houellebecq delights in consumption rather than denial. Though he suffers in the heat and foreign culture, Houellebecq, frequently at the urging of Gardin, partakes in e-cigarettes, DMT, and psilocybin mushrooms. This culminates in the final act when a large dose of the latter leaves the author first panicked and then silent. Gardin, no stranger to controversy herself, frequently advises Houellebecq — at the time of filming, embroiled in a real-world scandal involving an interview with Michel Onfray that intrudes on the world of the film — “Stop doing interviews! You’re a fabulous writer. Just write and shut the hell up.”
The film seems to emerge out of a similar sentiment toward Monsieur Houellebecq: a certain amount of compartmentalized frustration paired with a deep well of admiration and respect. Houellebecq’s racial politics emerge out of an intellectual (re)pose that wilts under confrontation — following one argument over cultural assimilation in France, Nicloux cuts to Houellebecq unable to urinate in front of another man — and the film does him the kindness of allowing him to be silent as these arguments reach a boiling point. Though it might seem ambitious, the horizons of Being Blanche Houellebecq are startlingly close to hand, its reach never quite exceeding that of a typical episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. “I’m kind of bored and the trip’s been tiring,” Houellebecq reflects in a lucid moment. It ends with him scuba diving, partaking in the fruits of the French Empire, its contradictions left to be resolved elsewhere.
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