“A little smile, perhaps?”, the sentence never to say to Nora Hamzaoui

There is the smile of the Mona Lisa.

And then there is the one, in the corner, of Joey Potter in the

, which I tried to reproduce so many times in front of the mirror when I was 15 years old.

I discovered both when I was a teenager, one during a school trip to the Louvre, jaded in Bombers, my Posh Spice blow-dry completely ruined by the November humidity;

the other in my sofa, slipping me a whole packet of Yes, and asking me the real age of the hero, James Van Der Beek, like every afternoon from 1999 to 2003. For me, the smile is linked in adolescence, like a constraint imposed by parents behind their cameras, who beg you to smile: "Come on, make a little effort, stop sulking a bit, it's Christmas, what..." Or like a laughter that dares not come out and that we control, because if we open our mouths too wide,

At that time, I wore CK One perfume and was fascinated by Kate Moss in absolutely every Calvin Klein campaign.

I explained her beauty to myself by the fact that she pulled her face (even if there was this ad where she burst out laughing, but, for my personal comfort, I had decided to hide it).

In video, eight cult laughs of women in the cinema

Not really fatal but rather unsympathetic

From there, I formulated a sort of rule for myself: to be a femme fatale is to sulk.

With girlfriends, we made an appointment at the Prisunic, we took our pose and our attitudes in the Photomaton, and, sometimes, by dint of squatting the cabin for hours and being lectured by the mothers who were waiting their turn, a giggle came out, leaving photo proof of this strange age, which is sometimes called the stupid age, of these young girls who are not yet women (but who are trying...).

Over the years, I stopped thinking about smiling.

I found the ones that made the mouth not really fatal but rather unsympathetic, and I let mine escape when it wanted, without fear, just belaying me at the end of meals, discreetly in the reflection of my knife ,

I also kept from that time the total inability to force myself and, faced with a photographer who asks me "A little smile, perhaps?", depending on my mood, at worst I accentuate my pout, at best I I think of Joey Potter and I offer a little side note that doesn't mean anything (apart from, maybe, "I'm doing what you ask, but I don't mean less.").

Because what I know today is that there is a form of truth in a smile, something that we receive and that we give, like a mini part of ourselves.

Something the opposite of the selfies, filters, pouts or smiles that are automatically made behind a screen for nothing or for no one.

Because smiling is a relationship and, much more than a pose, it's a feeling.