Review of ‘Return to Reims’: The essential documentary about the French working class

At one point in his illuminating autobiographical text Return to Reimsthe philosopher, sociologist and gay activist Didier Eribon affirms that, despite the difficulties inherent in any operation of outing, It was easier for him, once he moved to Paris, to come out of the gay closet than to come out of the class closet. In other words, that in the French and bourgeois society of the provinces, the one that Claude Chabrol knew how to portray so well in his fiction, recognizing oneself as a son of the proletariat is, and continues to be, a risky (social) operation.

It is appropriate to tell this because in Jean-Gabriel Périot’s adaptation of Eribon’s text, the director of our losses sacrifices one of the two legs on which the book stands, precisely the one that concerns the homosexual option adopted by the author, to focus only on class aspects. Although, in a wink that will not go unnoticed by any alert viewer, he places the authorial voiceover in the mouth of actress Adèle Haenel, not by chance, one of the most notorious LGTBI+ militants in French cinema, as well as the protagonist of that lesbian beauty. call Portrait of a woman on fire.

It is not difficult to understand why this option was adopted: because it is the one that best allows the film to be what it is, an archive documentary without the presence of actors or fictional reconstructions, which, without a doubt, would have been pushed by the telling the life of Eribon, A documentary, by the way, that aims at something as difficult as answering the crucial question in France these days: why has the working-class base, traditionally a left-wing voter, mutated to become the main support of Marine Le Pen and her xenophobic, nationalist and exclusionary extreme right.

Thus, with the formidable support of dazzlingly rich archive images, and thanks to a simply unbeatable editing job (courtesy of the director himself), Return to Reims it ends up becoming in the best example of political criticism seen on a screen in years. His conclusions could not be more devastating: the move from the left to the extreme right is supported, in many cases, by factors that have always been there, even though no one wanted to see them. For example, in the racism that so many workers have manifested ancestrally (against Algerians and Sub-Saharans, as in other times against the Portuguese or Spanish), which now leads them to identify themselves with the Lepenian mantra of “the French first.” For example, in a certain mistrust towards the intellectual and in the uncritical acceptance of values ​​much more related to machismo than to egalitarian ideals. Or, finally, that fund of French nationalism that cultivated so much, in the past, the official policy of the French Communist Party, that of Georges Marchais, without going any further. With which, in the end, the lyrics are not the same, but the music sounds strange, horribly familiar. And from there to throwing yourself into the hands of the enemy at the polls, there is only one step.

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DATA SHEET

Address: Jean-Gabriel Periot Original title: Return to Reims (Fragments) Country: France Year: 2021 Release date: 10–06-2022 Gender: Documentary film Script: Jean-Gabriel Periot. Novel: Didier Eribon Duration: 83 min.

Synopsis: Loosely adapted from the novel of the same name by French philosopher and historian Didier Eribon, it tells, through archival material, the intimate and political history of the French working class from the early 1950s to the present.