Rémy Verlyck is the general director of the
“
Familles Durables
”
think tank
, founded at the heart of the health crisis in 2021, whose aim is to think about the daily challenges of the 19 million families in France to better support them.
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“
I know too much to stop there.”
While Judith Godrèche says she is ready for battle, many people join her battalion, and that is fortunate.
“
For some time now, I have been talking, I have been talking, but I can't hear you, or barely.
Where are you, what do you say?”
she tells us in her essential speech at the Caesars ceremony.
We, responsible and rational adults, must make sense of what is happening and, with Judith Godrèche, identify and speak out about the monsters, speak out about the monstrosities of the past.
And this, without getting lost in the dream of a return to a fantasized moral order which gave rise to other abuses: it did not collapse for nothing.
The collective therapy through speech offered to us by the actress at the origin of #MeToo in French cinema by revealing the enormity of denial, can and must be an opportunity to reflect on the rebuilding of our society.
A refoundation on the care given to others, cooperation in the protection of dependencies and vulnerability, and above all on education for consent, for real freedom.
It is about our ability to love and live together.
The tempo of Judith Godrèche carries within it saving seconds of silence.
So much time to think.
On the air, the need for these words, calm, clear, is essential.
We listen, we see unfold in a new light what has shaped the half century that has just passed.
It is, in a way, a therapy through talking and listening;
of a collective psychoanalysis.
Maybe a little late.
In 2011, Benoît Jacquot explained, in
Les Ruses du Désir,
to the highly publicized psychoanalyst Gérard Miller that cinema was a perfect cover for illicit trafficking in young girls.
No official reaction.
The floor does not seize.
At the microphone of Léa Salamé, it is another facet of the drama that Judith Godrèche evokes, and oh so fundamental: the incapacity of adults - first and foremost her parents - to protect her, themselves struggling with their own injuries and weaknesses.
In this great collective awareness, the painful domino effect of our family relational scars must be mentioned.
In the Godrèche family, let's ask for the father.
Alain, psychoanalyst, comes from a Polish Jewish family who took refuge in Paris.
His daughter describes him as very fragile, absent, suffering from the trauma of abandonment from the war, when his parents had to leave him in Switzerland to seek shelter.
“
A crying child
,” she said,
“is dangerous when you’re on the run
. ”
The weight of words.
Consequently, this father reacts very badly to his separation, then to the next one.
For this child who starts working at 8 years old, he is not a protective father figure.
She is the one who reassures him.
She parents him.
The roles are reversed.
She is “
afraid he will leave”
.
Another fear of abandonment.
It was then that Benoît Jacquot, director, and Isabelle de La Patellière, agent, became surrogate parents;
reference figures.
During the 10 years of the actress's youthful work, both father and mother were unavailable.
They never discuss the roles of their daughter, who is a minor.
“
I don’t know if my mother ever had a discussion with Isabelle de La Patellière.”
A new culture is developing which gives pride of place to eroticism, and therefore to the eroticization of all, children, adolescents who, under the guise of freedom, opens the door to predators, invites them and celebrates them.
Rémy Verlyck
It is through the - incestuous - gaze of this substitute father that the child feels born and exists.
“As if you were born through the remarks he made about your beauty.
(…)
He creates the portrait of a child who will become yours.”
The child grows up under an influence which defines his relationship with the world.
The concepts intertwine in a violent reality,
“a story of love, influence, confinement, control, violence”
.
The first sexual relations disgust her, she is forced to enter the game.
“I never found him handsome”
.
His daily life becomes one of “
abuse and sadism”
;
but also lies intended to subjugate her: this incestuous surrogate father claims to have killed but also to have had improbable relationships with celebrities that the child admires.
Judith Godrèche constructs her identity through this gaze, she constructs her relationship with the world and her place in it, on deeply wounded emotional ground.
Quicksand.
“I don’t like the word woman
,” she finally explained to Françoise Giroud.
Later, she refused to testify during the Weinstein trials: she believed that her childhood made her
"perhaps someone who would be okay to abuse again
. "
She fails to complete
The Consent
of Vanessa Springora.
Too painful.
“You should never rush to live
,” says Catherine Ringer a week later at the same microphone, still Léa Salamé.
She promotes
The Eroticism of Living
, a show inspired by the poet Alice Mendelson, and evokes a need to heal certain wounds.
“I who also experienced, it is fashionable to talk about it, all the difficulties of a little young girl under influence throughout her youth, I found myself with pleasure talking about this sensuality with which I had to wrong.
It did me good.”
Further, “(
Alice Mendelson’s)
way
of talking about love and sensuality is healthy”
, a therapeutic breath after years of
“crying a lot”
.
Having also been a sex slave, entangled in pornography against her will, from the age of 13 to her 20, the singer of Rita Mitsouko remembers
“this period when under the pretext of art and evolution, and of being provocative, to shake up the old world, to do things that move forward, we were quite a few little girls who went astray, and who didn't run away, who didn't say no.
Could they even?
For this they would have had to grow up protected, guided, as well as educated in freedom.
A privilege.
The collapse of the moral, bourgeois order, which was too stifling or hypocritical, in the 1960s, was the occasion for a complete questioning of cultural, educational, emotional and sexual benchmarks;
and this, among other things influenced by the advocacy for the liberalization of sexual mores in the West of the American anthropologist Margaret Mead.
“Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!”
But to where?
Twenty years after the war, the door was slammed on
“moldy France”
.
A new culture is developing which gives pride of place to eroticism, and therefore to the eroticization of all, children, adolescents who, under the guise of freedom, opens the door to predators, invites them and celebrates them.
It was the time of France Gall, whom Gainsbourg liked to see singing
“Annie loves anise lollipops”
without her understanding the double meaning.
Handling.
This is the France of “Clodettes” and of grieving fans, victims of their idol.
Hold.
In this atmosphere of civilizational upheaval, a number of adults, traumatized and psychologically damaged by their own childhood, tried, as best they could, to raise their offspring as best they could, with what they had and especially with what they had. 'they did not have.
Our families are naturally privileged places of fragility, of suffering rooted in sometimes distant origins, and we have no other choice but to work to care for them, heal them, strengthen them.
Rémy Verlyck
“The moral order. This is the enemy. (…) We are at the end of the 70s. The traces of the May of the barricades linger on the walls and in people's heads. Forbidden to prohibit, let us challenge any form of authority.”
The era gives birth to hopes of unhindered enjoyment and monsters, explained Sorj Chalandon in 2001 in
Libération
.
“The ban, any ban, is felt to belong to the old world, to that of the embittered, the oppressors, the employer militias, the bludgeoning police, the corrupt.
(…) In this tumult, this reversal of senses, this anchoring of new benchmarks, in this new understanding of morality and law, this fragility and this urgency, everything that stands in the way of all freedoms must be brought down .
(…) Pedophilia, which does not say its name, is a simple element of this torment.
Except for those who claim it as an act of “militant education”, it rarely comes to the forefront.
The word is terrible today.
But she is not the problem then.
By itself, and only, it is part of a turbulent ferment, where everyone draws what they believe to be saving.
That's how it is, it's yesterday.
It's like that.
(…) Sleep with a child?
A freedom like any other.
Under all the pens, always, from articles to leaflets and speeches in free forums, the same words recur: “the evolution of our society”.
A man, no offense to Albert Camus, can't be stopped.
In the collapse of the old world which was no longer standing, many blind victims, easy prey.
“For some time now, words have been loosening. The image of our idealized fathers is being eroded,”
declaims Judith Godrèche.
“The cinema family represents society”
, but
“cinema is incestuous”
she continues before denouncing the eroticization and valorization of incest in films.
We can only be terribly moved to hear him talk about his
“identity crisis that has never stopped”.
If one is from one's childhood as one is from a country, too many are at a terrible disadvantage.
“Tearing myself away from this house is a never-ending task.”
Our families are naturally privileged places of fragility, of suffering rooted in sometimes distant origins, and we have no other choice but to work to care for them, heal them, strengthen them.
Because family is double or nothing.
What goes wrong there can have terrible consequences, multiplied tenfold, for decades.
Conversely, what good happens there is a tremendous investment, for individuals and society.
And often, it varies: there are ups and downs.
The future of our society made up of individuals depends on what they receive from their elders, and therefore what they can offer them, whether it is social or emotional capital.
The promotion of commitment, the recognition of the need for support of parents who are sometimes alone and exhausted in the face of the educational mission is imperative.
Resilience is not automatic, it is often a sometimes costly privilege.
Let us save ourselves the need to resort to it.
But you also have to dig.
In order to strengthen the bonds of solidarity, love, friendship that bind us, we have no other choice than to consider a therapeutic review of the bruises of our pasts, often marked by the absence or violence of men, fathers.
For this awareness, we must thank Judith Godrèche.
Freed from control, freed from denial, doesn't she deserve a scarlet Phrygian cap?