It has already been a while since Guillaume Gallienne was around the idea of publishing a novel. But between theater, cinema and life, perhaps time has been missing. Stock editions and the great my night collection at the museum have appropriately taken the plunge with The mist which appears on May 7. An autobiographical account of moving sincerity, super funny and in which he tells himself through the great female figures that have marked his life.
It is an understatement to say that the company had started badly. Initially, Guillaume Gallienne had chosen to spend the night at the National Museum in Tbilissi, under the portrait of her Georgian great-grandmother, Princess Mélita Cholokachvili, imagining herself strolling in the splendor of the masterpieces of Ilya Rénda, ancestral icons and the treasure of the Golden Fleece, to write “The story of these paintings with my intimate mythology “. But patatras! Once there, the ancestor’s painting was moved to the National Gallery, a stone’s throw from the museum. A sanitized place, soulless, kept by three mutical vigils, a thousand leagues from the expected decorum. A misunderstanding that gives rise to an inaugural firing inaugural, leaving the actor and his slightly confused camp. A black anger which, even if it will quickly fall back, constitutes the first thread of a story which will force it to wonder about its family inheritance. All these things that we lide over generations, which we sometimes transmit unwittingly and which we free ourselves without difficulty.
Thus this anger which he carries by him, instantly referring him to an irascible father, by hand and which he took a long time to loosen the grip. Until the day when, at 23, during a family trip to the Georgian cousins, he dares to oppose him head on when the latter reproaches him for arriving too late at dinner.
Liberative sequence not devoid of a certain sense of formula: “My father’s paranoia, his need to register, direct, that everything is profitable, that we should especially never waste time, but shit! Take the tone instead of losing it, damn it! He left the rage piece, it did not make me hot or cold. (…) It was over. I was no longer this tyrannized, humiliated child, in lack of love which is forced to escape in his reveries to exist. “
But it is not only for the actor to unravel the shadow share here that everyone carries in him. Very quickly, moreover, the story rolls in the footsteps of all those to whom it owes so much. All the women of his life to whom this book actually pays a wonderful tribute. Starting with his illustrious Georgian grandmothers: Mélita (her great-grandmother, that of the portrait hung at the national gallery of Tbilisi) and especially Cai, (Lydia Zelensky, her maternal grandmother, Proustian character in devil) with whom he grew up. These women have clearly shaped the artist he has become, instilling with immense tenderness their love for reading and beautiful things, a certain aristocratic singularity devoid of snobbery, a devastating humor and above all “This way of seeing life as an opportunity to make what we have received. From her that I have this intoxication of melancholy against which I fight (..) by telling stories in all possible forms “.
-Of course, it is impossible not to mention the beautiful lines he also devotes to his wife Amandine in contact with whom he was “finally authorized to love each other “. Like those he dedicates to his mother. We laugh with him when he says that the day of his wedding, he told him for the first time that he loved him.”The poor, it has paralyzed her. I didn’t care, I was happy, it made me laugh.”
He does not forget the disappeared either, his sister and his adored cousin Alicia, died at 20 years old and whose poems he published in 2020 (The other half of the dream belongs to me at Gallimard), because their deaths force him. “”My deaths have become my duty of memory and transmission“An absolutely relevant notion in the journey of a hypersensitive and complexed kid, which may have allowed him to leave his chrysalis. A particularly well described process in this story of initiation of great loyalty. No wonder he dedicated to his son Tado.
“The Brume drinker” by Guillaume Gallienne, Stock editions, 277 pages, 19.90 euros
Extract : “I inherited my father his authority and his anger. This terrible anger that can invite me in a few seconds and spring like the lava of an eruption volcano. As much as my mother was moaning a lot as soon as it was disturbed, that is to say all the time, as much my father, he was screaming. His anger was formidable and, if we did not want to become his release, it was not necessary to remain in his spare. Disappearing.
