A friend asked me what my favorite book had been in my entire life. I wanted to tell him that I had read too little to dare to make a choice and that would have been true. Reading is too broad a field. If she had asked me what my favorite film had been in my entire life, I would have hesitated of course, but on the criteria more than on the answer. Should I have chosen the best film, or the most touching for me, or the one that reminded me of the best personal memory, or quite simply the first film I had seen, the one that made me love cinema and thus opened the way for all the other sessions, more or less successful but each time promising a special moment?
If this friend had asked me about cinema, after a thousand hesitations, a thousand possible Palmes d'Or, I would undoubtedly have answered The Adventures of Robin Hood. No cinephilic argument would have come to support my choice, because I must have been five or six years old when this wonder came to condition the rest of my cultural tastes. I didn't know the names of the actors, much less of course that of the director, I understood the story broadly but not in detail, and even if certain scenes remained in my memory like a flash of wonder, which What I have left of this film is of another order, and it is neither Blu-ray nor the platforms that will restore it to me. What remains for me above all is an evening of happiness to which everything contributed.
The first ingredient of this miraculous evening was the night. I imagine it was winter because I don't see my parents taking me to the cinema in the evening, after dinner. But what I am sure of is that it was dark, and that we were going out at a time of the day when we usually tend to be returning. When I say that “we” were going out, I must be very precise: “we”, that evening, for a reason forgotten or never known, it was not my father, my mother, my sister and me, it It was just my dad and me. Had Mom asked him to take me away? Or to do something special with me in the spirit of justice, my sister being invited to participate in another awesome attraction? In any case, here I am alone with my father in the street, my hand in his, and the third, fundamental element which works for the success of this expedition, is that he is visibly happy too.
The cinema that awaits us no longer exists. It is a large hall located in a large park, which bears the sweet name of Auteuil Bon Cinéma. Nothing bad can happen to us in a place like this, it's made for us, it's us who are expected there. The film is in color. As he folds my coat in four to slip it under my behind to make sure I can see clearly, I hear my father say, as if to himself: “It’s the first color film I’ve seen. » This remark contributes to the value I place on this moment: my father is not only happy to please me, to do his duty as a dad in short, he also derives, for himself, personal satisfaction from our outing . This gives me a kind of relief. The images only seem more flamboyant to me and, on the screen, the air of the forests more vivid, the water of the rivers clearer, the horses' hooves more noisy and the heroes more heroic.
The word Fin unfortunately invaded the screen, there was our return home, and thus settled in me forever this conviction mixed with crazy nostalgia that the favorite film is perhaps not the greatest masterpiece produced by the biggest studios in the world, but the one that imprints in your heart the conviction, almost the reflex, that if we go out this evening, if we have agreed on a film, it will float in the air the excitement that the prospect injects of a good time shared.
It remains to apply this approach to the world of books, a veritable ocean compared to the small lake of the world of films. I see my sister again, one summer, removing from the library of the house where we spent our vacations not one but two volumes of War and Peacein pocket format. Not to read them, but to reread them! I have never played in this category. It remains for me to humbly cherish and thank my first book, the one that I knew and loved to read one day, the one that opened the way for many others. Not enough, but in reading it's never enough. So when, at the old book fair in Compiègne last week, I saw “waiting for me” on a table Baby's House, in perfect condition, I bought it without hesitation, not to read it, but to reread it one day with a very young child, and say to him quietly: “That, you know, is my favorite book. »
