The film Blue Heron at the cinema, Laure Prouvost at the Grand Palais, a novel by Olivier Bourdeaut… Madame Figaro’s culture week

Family on the line

At the end of the 1990s, while little Sasha settled on Vancouver Island with her family, life changed: her older brother, Jérémy, behaved in increasingly inexplicable ways. He steals, intentionally hurts himself, isolates himself, becomes threatening… Since he was 6 years old, he has not been like the others, but when his mental health deteriorates, his parents are helpless, consumed by their helplessness in the face of his undiagnosed disorder. What is the disease that is eating away at their son? How can you help him while protecting his brothers and sister? How can you accept that your child represents a danger for himself and for others? Blue Heronpartly autobiographical, the Canadian-Hungarian Sophy Romvari questions her past to examine a social issue: the mental health of young people and its effects on the family. The result is a feature film where realism and chaos coexist with gentleness and poetry, nestled in the memories of a little girl during a sunny summer. In line withAfter sunby Charlotte Wells, this first film invites us to make peace with our ghosts, to accept that we sometimes have to give up understanding, and to recognize that love is not always enough to help those who are most dear to us. M. L. 
«Blue Heron», de Sophy Romvari, avec Eylul Guven, Amy Zimmer, Edik Beddoes, Iringó Retà …

A multisensory experience

Laure Prouvost deploys with “We, thrills of stars”, an immersive installation which extends her exploration of a sensitive language, freed from linear logic. The artist, who represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2019 with Deep See Blue Surrounding Youhas continued to expand its narrative vocabulary, mixing fiction, perception and sensory drift. Conceived as a journey, the exhibition opens on an initiatory tunnel (passage from shadow to light) before revealing a fluid landscape in the heart of the nave of the Grand Palais, in Paris. Laure Prouvost summons the imagination of quantum physics to shift our apprehension of reality: “What might one feel when perceiving reality from a quantum point of view?”, she asks, fueled by two years of research with the philosopher Tobias Rees and the scientist Hartmut Neven, the project relies on quantum computing to generate images and sounds with unstable and vibratory qualities. The Beginninga kinetic sculpture with an organic feel, pulses to the rhythm of light and sound, while the video We Felt a Star Dying connects living and non-living matter in a cosmic continuity. Around, the Cute Bits float like suspended entities… The whole forms a total environment where smells, textures and sound spatialization engage the visitor’s body. Faithful to her taste for off-centered stories, Laure Prouvost does not seek to explain but to make people experience. L. C. 
“Laure Prouvost. We, thrills of stars”, until July 26, at the Grand Palais, in Paris. grandpalais.fr

The torments of parentage

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We remember the very special atmosphere ofWaiting for Bojangles (2016), the novel that made him known. With courageous sincerity, Olivier Bourdeaut, after three other books, looks back on his childhood and youth marked by an abusive father. The story does not seek to make a diagnosis (perverse personality without a doubt), its strength comes rather from the restitution of the terrible ambivalence of this son who, despite the blows and the humiliations, continues to love his father and to want to be admired by him, calling for the beautiful day when he will finally find the way to no longer be a “good for nothing”. Because, of course, the toxicity of this alcoholic and heavy smoker father, in permanent war against the whole world, destroys family life and any potential success of the children. The mother, for her part, took refuge in fearful submission. has two other boys and two girls, all also persecuted) is a hothead, a bad student and a violent comrade who beats up in turn… But there you have it, this son in distress wants to become a writer and will not give up, despite the financial insecurity, depression, refusals from publishers, to write is to show the father who you are and – what is undoubtedly the most disturbing here – to declare your love to him, in spite of everything. even grown up, still hopes for the affection of his tormentor, behind the overwhelming portrait of this man, who does not seem far from thinking that he has a right of life and death over the members of his family, hide all the abused children, so numerous. This man is both a patient and a product of patriarchy and our powerlessness. literary, can help teenagers in difficulty understand that what they are experiencing is neither normal nor acceptable, and to ask for help. I. P.
A story of love and violenceby Olivier Bourdeaut, Gallimard Editions, 240 p., 20.50 €.