Le Figaro — Pornographic film: after losing his court case in the Netherlands, Houellebecq appeals

LE FIGARO EXCLUSIVE — On Tuesday, the Dutch courts refused to ban the film in which Michel Houellebecq appears.

By Eloi Passot. Published 28 March 2023 at 13:32; updated 29 March 2023 at 11:31.

Michel Houellebecq has not had the last word. After the Dutch courts rejected his request to ban the erotic film in which he appears, the celebrated writer has decided to appeal. ‘Michel Houellebecq has decided to appeal; this morning we filed an appeal in the summary proceedings,’ says his lawyer, Jacqueline Schaap, who had described the ruling as ‘very disappointing’.

After the release of a trailer showing him in bed in the arms of a young woman, the celebrated writer, once considered a contender for the Nobel Prize, brought proceedings to prevent the full film from being shown. The author of The Map and the Territory says he agreed to appear in the film by signing a contract, ‘on condition that [his] anonymity was preserved’. According to him, the director failed to honour that condition.

An ‘unequal’ and ‘unacceptable’ contract, but not an ‘invalid’ one

The court ultimately ruled that the contract signed by the writer ‘is unbalanced but not invalid’, explains Schaap. It was ‘one of the most unequal and unacceptable contracts I have ever seen’. After Houellebecq terminated the contract in March, the lawyer had sought to argue that ‘there is no longer any authorisation to use the footage in which Michel Houellebecq was filmed’.

For his part, the director maintained that Michel Houellebecq had consented to being filmed with full knowledge of what he was doing. ‘It is a form of censorship,’ said his lawyer, Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm, who had argued ‘that, as a writer, Michel Houellebecq has extensive experience of contracts and was not entitled to cancel this one’. Arguments that the judges evidently accepted, much to the dismay of the writer, who had also recently faced the threat of legal action over his remarks about Muslims during a discussion with Michel Onfray for the magazine Front Populaire.