Big news for the writer Jérôme Ferrari: a new book is coming out at Actes Sud, and then tomorrow comes out the adaptation of one of his previous ones by the also Corsican director Thierry de Peretti. There is something to be doubly happy about, because both are excellent, and above all the two seen and read at the same time shed light on a way of making novels among the finest and most exciting that exist today in France, in my opinion.
So I start with the new novel which is called North Sentinel : it is the story of a stab wound, the one inflicted by the young Alexandre Romani in the stomach of the student Alban Genevey in the summer crowd of a small port on the island. The first is Corsican, the second spends his holidays there since his parents bought a second home there. From what could be a news item, Ferrari draws a whole genealogy of violence, going back to the Romani family, but also to the great mechanics of colonization, all this in barely one hundred and forty pages of a continuous breath, which carries ancestral legends, family myths and small scenes of trivial daily life. It is an “I” who speaks, an implied narrator since the uncle in some way of the murderer: a voice full of anger and contempt towards these barbaric natives of Romani, at the same time full of pity, of empathy; a cruel voice that points out the vanity and ridicule of great values, and at the same time a voice as if stuck in them, whose overhang seems constantly compromised by affects, and the feeling of belonging to the Corsican territory, to its culture and its customs, including the most brutal.
Transpose
This double movement, of love/hate, of adhesion/tearing away, is fundamental in Ferrari’s writing, which speaks of Corsica, of the Corsican family since its beginnings, notably in his book which won the Goncourt “The Sermon on the Fall of Rome”. It is an ambivalence in the way of telling a story, which combines in the style a colorful lyricism, pushed to the point of grandiloquence, and a biting satirical intention, a way of constructing characters of a striking complexity and an extraordinary depth, of loving them while hating them at the same time, like this Romani and his father, thick and stubborn brutes whose fragility passes from father to son.
Well, this ambivalence, which is really due to the writing, the filmmaker Thierry de Peretti, who is truly a great filmmaker, manages to give it a form on screen, by adapting a previous novel by Ferrari, which is called A son image, with a gallery of unknown Corsican actors. It is the story of Antonia, a young woman who grows up in a small Corsican village in the 80s, falls in love with Pascal, who belongs to a separatist movement, becomes a photographer for a local newspaper, then leaves to cover the war in Yugoslavia. It is a complicated novel that mixes periods, multiplies points of view and characters by going back in the genealogy of the young girl.
Not easy, a thousand traps everywhere: the chronological scope, the abundance of personnel, the strangeness that constitutes the war in the Balkans: one could fear the heavy family melodrama, the educational treatise on Corsican separatism, the meta-cinematographic pensum on photography; one could fear that the respective talents of the two authors would cancel each other out – it is so difficult to adapt a novel. Thierry de Peretti manages to make it a moving, very dense film, which is at once a tragedy, a political thriller, a family fresco, and above all, he manages to hold together everything that makes Ferrari’s novels so rich: empathy and distance, the mystical and the ignoble, the tragedy and the chronicle, and he succeeds because he makes a novel, with the means of cinema,
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