Claire Simon’s new documentary portrait Writing Life – Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students is, for the most part, strikingly straightforward. Clocking in at 90 minutes, the film is made up of a series of conversations featuring teachers and students discussing various works by famed French author Annie Ernaux, one of our great living writers and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022. There is no cross-cutting between groups or talking-head style interviews, just observational vignettes documenting various classes from secondary schools around France. It’s unclear how Simon chose each location, but she gathers footage not just from the urban center of Paris, but also various suburbs, provinces, and even a school overseas in Cayenne, French Guiana. With one exception, the teachers are all female, and the majority of students are, as well. This disparity is never directly commented upon, but it’s one of many elements floating around in the periphery of the project. The film is not explicitly political in any obvious way, but in this age of increased right-wing influence and encroaching AI tech, simply documenting the act of pedagogy feels somehow revolutionary. More than a few students reference Ernaux’s well-known articulation of her own work, where she states, “I adopted a neutral, flat style, without metaphor, violence or emotion.” Simon’s film follows suit, presenting these sessions without context or commentary, inviting viewers to engage with the work in much the same way as the students themselves.
It’s bracing to witness these young people grapple with the bluntly explicit, sometimes shocking material contained in Ernaux’s works. They reflect on their own lives with real honesty, offering perspectives on their parents and love lives that sometimes mirror and sometimes diverge from Ernaux’s own words. But these are also still children; a particularly graphic passage in Happening, detailing going to the bathroom in minute detail, elicits giggles from the students. Until, that is, the excerpt ends not with the flushing of fecal matter, but the passing of an aborted fetus. The students also seem disturbed by how harshly Ernaux writes about her parents; it’s a small sample size, but despite the variances in their geographical locations and different levels of wealth, most seem deferential to their elders and reluctant to criticize them too harshly. One particularly divisive moment occurs when a group reads about Ernaux losing her virginity; the passages reveal a mixture of excitement, reticence, and even remorse on the writer’s part, which several students interpret as sexual assault. The teacher gently pushes back, pointing out words and phrases that imply consent, but at least one student stands her ground and suggests firmly that someone from an older generation might not have had the context or vocabulary to understand the nature of the assault done to them. It’s extremely prickly stuff, but one can hardly imagine a subject more important for young people to comprehend as they stand on the cusp of entering the world of adulthood.
It’s all surprisingly gripping stuff, and Simon gives each vignette just enough time to breathe, zeroing in on gestures and main ideas before moving on to the next group. If nothing else, Writing Life is a feat of editing, wrangling who knows how much raw footage into a comprehensible whole. The film ends with a brief moment where Simon abandons her own structure and leaves the confines of a school to follow a group of young women outside. They continue the conversation they had started in the classroom, and when the group finally breaks apart and says their goodbyes, Simon lingers on one particular girl. She speaks directly with the girl, and after a moment they part ways with a polite farewell. It’s a lovely moment, expressing how what we learn in the classroom comes with us out into the world, informing our lives in ways we might not know how to articulate. Writing Life becomes, then, not just a celebration of an important writer and public figure, but also a tribute to the importance of education itself, an art and a value under increasing threat every successive day.
Published as part of Venice Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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