THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – MUST SEE
The intimacy of a documentary subject, associated with the dramas which may be linked to it, can lead a filmmaker to resort to the subterfuges of fiction, the register of play sometimes helping to deliver what is evaded – out of fear, out of modesty, out of too much suffering – in the register of reality. This was the case recently in Olfa’s Daughters (2023), by Tunisian Kaouther Ben Hania, which brought in actors to interact with the characters of a documentary which evoked the destiny of a larger-than-life mother and her damaged relationships with men and her own daughters.
We must believe that mother-daughter relationships, their intensity, their degree of passion and violence often, their furious madness sometimes, require this type of distancing device since the director Mona Achache also uses it in Little Girl Blue. And the drama is given straight away, with the discovery, the 1er May 2016, of the body of his mother, Carole Achache, 63 years old, hanged in her apartment. She bequeathed to her daughter entire boxes of documents – photos, letters, film and sound recordings – and the nagging, heavy, paralyzing question of her suicide.
The documents, by the thousands, are there for that. They offer leads, discoveries, surprises. They also open up abysses. They restore an image of this mother that the daughter did not necessarily know. Mona Achache, undoubtedly overwhelmed, undoubtedly incapable of placing herself at the center of this quest, imagines a curious path to continue moving forward. An intercession. An actress who would lend her features to those of the deceased mother, to undertake to tell the story of the disappearance of the character of which she gradually takes possession. An actress who would agree to play the medium by imbuing herself with the mother’s spirit, putting on her clothes, putting on her perfume, acting out scenes from her life. This actress – and the exercise is curiously made all the more delicate – is named Marion Cotillard.
Youth trauma
And yet the investigation is moving forward. Carole Achache, strangely, reveals herself much more as a daughter than as a mother. Daughter of Monique Lange, in this case, strong woman, editor at Gallimard, screenwriter (Roberto Rossellini, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Joseph Losey, excuse me), novelist, figure of the intellectual world of the 1950s, exclusively in love with homosexuals . Carole’s father, the writer Juan Goytisolo, thus formed a false couple with Monique, whom he asked to abort during her pregnancy, just as he was a false father for Carole. A close relationship is therefore established between Carole and her mother, who early involves her daughter in her intellectual and social life. Jean Genet, whom she reveres, will instruct Carole intellectually, not without exercising his perversity on her and without her mother apparently finding fault with it.
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