In the shoes of Blanche Houellebecq: a joyful, twisting and shaky mess (review)

Accustomed to spinning Michel Houellebecq, Guillaume Nicloux mischievously deconstructs the image of the controversial author in a story of a lookalike competition.

Michel Houellebecq took hallucinogenic mushrooms. Things are not going well: he can no longer speak and his cadaverous Droopy face is almost liquid… The situation lasts a long time, several scenes, to the point that Houellebecq seems to have almost disappeared from the film. If Guillaume Nicloux has long observed the author as an unsuspected object of comedy, capable of insane outbursts (The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq and more recently Thalasso), he sees him today as a man who no longer really has a body, suffering his status as a ghost between two worlds.

Never in his place, unsuitable, extinct. The weight of his latest books and his polemical declarations have been there: very aware of playing with nitroglycerin, Nicloux assigns Blanche Bardin to him as a guard, a free electron who sharply puts him in his place (“ But you're talking nonsense! ), before heading to a Michel Houellebecq lookalike competition taking place in Guadeloupe. The idea is quite brilliant to propel a film that is inevitably shaky (lots of improv) but often twisting, where nothing is completely true or completely false.

In the middle of this joyous bazaar, a completely Houellebecquian community withdrawal and the slavery past of Guadeloupe confront each other, with, in particular, real interviews with independence activists. We quickly understand that beyond the farce and Houellebecq's autopsy, for Nicloux it is above all a question of questioning his contradictions. And so ours.

Of Guillaume Nicloux With Blanche Gardin, Michel Houellebecq, Luc Schwarz… Duration 1h28. Released March 13