MaintenanceI would not have arrived there if… Each week, “Le Monde” questions a personality on a decisive moment in his life. Marked very early on by the death of her father in the Algerian war, the filmmaker will find an outlet thanks to theater and cinema.
After The Beautiful Season (2015), and An impossible love (2018), adapted from the novel by Christine Angot, Catherine Corsini signs The divide, currently in theaters. At 65, the director stages a couple of women on the verge of separation, against a backdrop of the “yellow vests” crisis, a self-portrait.
I wouldn’t have made it here if …
If I had not found in a trunk, at the age of 7, a list of films written in perfect handwriting, copies of Cinema notebooks and of Positive, records by Brel and Ferré, theater programs from the time of Jean Vilar. This trunk, given by my mother, belonged to my father, who died in the Algerian war, where he had been sent as conscript, at the age of 26. She stayed in my room for a long time. I fell as if in adoration of what it contained, inhabited by the duty to revive the memory of my father. He wanted to become an actor or a director. This inheritance constituted me in this somewhat crazy, radical love of theater first, then cinema.
Where did you live?
My parents lived in Paris, in a small two-room apartment, they had no money and had entrusted me to my grandparents, in Dreux (Eure-et-Loir). They came to see me on weekends. My mother was a nurse. My father, who had left his Corsican village at the age of 15, did odd jobs. Antimilitarist, he hoped to escape his military service in Algeria. The mayor of 10e arrondissement of Paris, a Corsican, whom he had requested, replied: “I only have daughters, but if I had a son I’d be proud if he left. “
So he left in 1958. He wrote my mother very beautiful, very sweet letters. He said that Algeria resembled Corsica, but evoked his ardent desire to return. He died a month and a half after arriving, in a stupid truck accident. His name was Antoine.
What memories do you keep of him?
I was two and a half years old when he died. I thought a lot, daydreamed, about the man he was. He wrote poems, he was tender. He had the good looks of the men of those years, always elegant in their crisp suits, they all looked like Clark Gable! At school, at “father’s profession”, I wrote “disappeared”. I was persuading myself in a somewhat crazy, obsessive way that things were being kept from me, that he was not really dead and was going to come and get me.
Widowed at 24, my mother spoke of him as an idyllic, unreal being, almost a god, with whom she said she had lived a very great love affair. It was overwhelming. In the photos, I saw a young happy couple, with dreams, projects, at the dawn of their life, broke. I have always found this to be a huge injustice. This feeling of revolt constitutes me.
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