The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq
Keeping it unreal
The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, comedy/drama, not rated, in French with subtitles, The Screen, 2.5 chiles
The opening line of Huckleberry Finn, “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter,” comes to mind with The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, a bizarre movie that falls somewhere in the nebulous landscape between documentary, fiction, true-life drama, comedy, and autobiographical essay.
If you have not been keeping up with contemporary French literature, you may not know who the hell Houellebecq is, and without that knowledge you’d be a bit lost here. So I will enlighten you. He’s a controversial novelist and poet whose work has won literary prizes and been denounced as hate speech. He landed in court in 2002 on a charge of inciting racial hatred for disparaging remarks he made about Islam while promoting his novel Platform. He was acquitted. He was the caricatured cover boy on the
Charlie Hebdo issue when the murderous attack took place, on the same day his novel Submission, which posited an Islamist takeover of the French government in 2022, hit the bookstores.
In 2011, Houellebecq briefly disappeared while he was promoting another novel, and the rumor was that he had been abducted by al-Qaida. This turns out not to have been the case, but it provides the point of departure for Guillaume Nicloux’s movie.
In the film, Houellebecq (played by himself) is abducted by three stooges named Luc (Luc Schwarz), Mathieu (Mathieu Nicourt), and Max (Maxime Lefrançois), who are impressed with his celebrity and literary intellect, but don’t have much of an idea what to do with him once they’ve got him. The movie’s opening section, before the abduction, is spent mostly in aimless and not very interesting conversations with various people about such topics as Le Corbusier, Houellebecq’s preference for Beethoven over Mozart, and what color he should paint his kitchen.
But don’t give up. After the snatch, things acquire an intriguing drollery. The kidnappers take him to a house in the country near a junkyard, where he is kept manacled much of the time but otherwise treated with friendly courtesy by his captors and Mathieu’s parents, whose home it is. They feed him well, provide wine and cigarettes, engage in spirited conversations about literature and other things, teach him to wrestle, and generally treat him as an honored guest. The mother, Ginette (Ginette Suchotzky) even asks if he’d like some pornography, and when he says he’d rather have a real girl, she procures a willing young local named Fatima (Marie Bourjala).
Houellebecq is a little guy with a collapsed face, an apparent lack of upper teeth, big ears, a prominent nose, and an ever-present cigarette. He might bring to mind a Gallic Woody Allen. His writing advice to Mathieu is “to have nothing to do, to be bored, and then something happens in your head.”
The movie is a little like that.