Le Figaro — ‘Houellebecq loves scandal’: BFMTV investigates the pornographic film the writer is trying to ban
By Benjamin Puech. Published 15 March 2023 at 19:11.
VIDEO — In a documentary, the channel met the director at the centre of the controversy. It also examines the novelist’s relationship with Islam. One question keeps nagging at it: does Houellebecq really know what he is doing?
Even the most faithful Houellebecq devotees, those prepared to do anything to defend the great oracle of French literature, let out a cry of surprise. Michel, in an erotic film! The trailer released on 24 January showed Houellebecq wrapping his long, weary arms around an undressed young woman.
The French government, which wants to raise young people’s awareness of the dangers of porn, will find no more effective campaign. The full video, entitled Kirac 27, was due to be released on 11 March. But the author swears he became an actor against his will. He therefore brought legal proceedings in France, where his case was dismissed, and is continuing the fight in the Netherlands. There was allegedly excessive drinking, and thus a breach of trust, when the contract was signed. The ruling will be delivered on 28 March, Libération explains.
For Houellebecq, le sulfureux, broadcast on 10 March and available on catch-up on RMC BFM Play, the Ligne rouge team travelled to the Netherlands to interview the woman at the heart of the affair. The journalists enter an Amsterdam suburb, pleased to discover an atmosphere worthy of one of the writer’s novels. Jini Jane, a student who sells her charms on OnlyFans, welcomes them. ‘His wife wanted me to make love to him. I was very clear: that was possible only if it was filmed as part of a porn film,’ she says matter-of-factly, showing selfies taken with Houellebecq just after getting out of bed. In them, the writer wears what she considers his ‘biggest smile’: a faint grimace. Could he have been unaware he was being filmed? ‘Impossible,’ the young woman insists.
His mother and Islam
‘Houellebecq was really down,’ the film’s director, Stefan Ruitenbeek, recounted in detail in Libération in February. ‘Then I saw him wake up, come back to life; he talked and made love for three hours in front of my camera.’ On BFMTV, this fellow, who presents himself as a libertarian artist, describes his ambition: ‘We wanted to play with the boundaries between reality and fiction, as he does in his films.’ He presumably means Guillaume Nicloux’s The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq or Thalasso. We will learn little more about the truth behind this strange porno. Was our star trapped? Or did he fail to consider the consequences of his sexual escapade and back out at the last moment?
BFMTV changes course, towards Islam. The journalists bring up the lines that recently caused a scandal: ‘I believe the wish of the so-called native French population is not at all for Muslims to assimilate, but simply for them to stop robbing and assaulting them,’ Houellebecq wrote in late 2022 in the magazine Front Populaire, before revising the passages at issue. The documentary asks whether his mother’s past as a communist and anti-colonial activist — a mother he hates — might have something to do with his current positions. ‘He clearly has a certain detachment from his writings. Is he really aware that they can affect people, hurt them? I don’t know; it has always been a question for me,’ the rector of the Paris Mosque confesses on BFMTV. Although he agreed to revise his remarks, Michel Houellebecq has often proclaimed his right to freedom of expression. And even to blasphemy.
According to Emmanuel Pierrat, who used to be his lawyer, the novelist knows what he is doing. At least at the outset. ‘He is a great communicator; at one point he may have chosen to become an unpleasant, swaggering character […]. He loves scandal; he cannot help stirring it up, even if the consequences may worry him.’ More than twenty years ago, in 2002, Guillaume Durand questioned him in particular about his remarks on Islam, which he had called ‘the stupidest religion’. The author replied: ‘Do I believe that? I have no idea. It depends on the day…’ The documentary then replays a report with the author in Pattaya, a centre of sex tourism in Thailand. ‘Conditions are less inhuman here. It isn’t that the girls like being whores. But how many people like their jobs?’ the novelist can be heard saying. That sort of analysis, perhaps more cynical than provocative, ultimately sums him up rather well.