“Their Children After Them”, from the best-seller to the blurred image – Libération

The adaptation of Nicolas Mathieu's novel by the Boukherma brothers sacrifices the sociopolitical subject to the point of contradiction, depicting teenage love in a deindustrialized region of the 90s.

Through its success and its laurels (Goncourt Prize 2018), Their Children after them by Nicolas Mathieu has taken its part like no other recent work of literature in the great aggiornamento of French fiction in the representation of the working classes. A whole section of literary production from Barbusse to Eribon, and cinematographic production from Carné to Kechiche, had of course already looked beyond their destiny, in parallel with its particular interest in bourgeois existences. a priori closer to those of the artists, shaping specific and, often, engaged languages ​​and types of narrative. But Mathieu, by his own proximity to the world that he describes in his second novel (that of the peri-urban areas of the Vosges) and his desire to develop a romantic story playing to the fullest on connivance through nostalgia (l action, punctuated by the hits of the time, takes place in the 90s) has moved the lines considerably, even brought down a supporting wall: its story told for “all”, without laborious mediation, for the pure pleasure of a fiction electrified by