“A Complete Reconfiguration of the World”
A conversation between Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Ernaux and filmmaker Céline Sciamma on feminisms past and present.
JANUARY 25, 2023
Cergy is their native terrain: That’s where we met up with Annie Ernaux and Céline Sciamma. But the writer and the filmmaker have much more in common than this ville nouvelle [new town] in the western part of the Île-de-France. Their respective bodies of work illuminate the weight of social norms, as well as the liberating power of desire. Both avowed feminists, they are fully committed to the struggles of their time.
“You aren’t like the others,” Lisa says to Laure at the beginning of your film “Tomboy,” Céline. Can you tell us, both of you, what you were like as children, particularly with regard to what we might call norms — whatever they may be, of gender or society?
ANNIE ERNAUX: When I was little, I was very lighthearted and sure of myself, quite cheeky as well. Two memories of Yvetot, in Normandy, are engraved on my memory: I am 5 years old. I’m playing with a little boy building a sandcastle. At some point he takes off his underpants and says, “Now we have to water it.” I watch him. … I find it very interesting. [Laughs.] In the blink of an eye my mother comes and literally tears me away from that hellish sight. Another memory: I am 8 and playing with my cousin in the staircase, and at a certain point I take off my underpants and ask her to prick me on my vulva, and once again my mother storms in and calls me a “pervert,” saying, “At your age!” Anything to do with sex was severely punished by my mother. For a little girl, the genitals were meant to be the most ugly thing. As for boys, they were encouraged to be predators. When I was a child I was at ease socially, but that stopped when I went to school. I didn’t speak well — part dialect, part working-class French. My manners were given a bit of a “makeover.” I was very marked by that. Social norms and the way girls were meant to behave were inscribed on the body. It weighed heavily on me, extremely so.
CÉLINE SCIAMMA: It’s funny that you recall your childhood through these two primal scenes of being chastised because I also felt, when I was a child, like I was being shackled every time I tried to exercise my freedom. The difference is that I grew up here, in Cergy, a city “without a bourgeois heart,” as you put it so well. I spent my early years in this new city, inhabited by youth — as it was so often young parents who came to settle here. Cergy’s approach to urban planning, separating pedestrians from cars, meant that children, myself included, had a lot of freedom to move through the city. But at the same time, limits to that freedom arrived very early, when I began to feel strongly attracted to girls: a forbidden desire. At the outset, you’re alone with your desire. It’s not written about in books, it isn’t in people’s imaginations; it doesn’t exist in your family and it doesn’t have a name. And so this desire that you have had to invent becomes the center of your existence. That’s where the arts help you to live. The memory of the irruption of that desire will nourish you all your life.
ERNAUX: I was very struck by “Tomboy,”[i] and especially that awful scene where the mother forces Laure/Mickaël to wear a dress and admit to having lied and pretended to be a boy. It goes right to the heart of the tragedy of childhood.
SCIAMMA: You know, I wouldn’t film that scene again today. I wouldn’t be able to film that kind of violence. That sequence occasioned a lot of commentary and debate when the film came out; the audience rejected it. People couldn’t bear to see adults dominating children like that, even though it’s everywhere around us. I’d go so far as to say it’s the great scandal, a naturalized, essentialized domination, but we don’t want to see it.
Annie, your parents’ relationship did not embody the traditional distribution of male and female roles. What impact did this have on your development? And what was that like in your family, Céline?
ERNAUX: Yes, that’s right. All gentleness came from my father. My mother, who had an imposing physique, ran the business; she was the boss lady, never hesitating to throw the drunken men out of the café. But she was also the butt of a lot of jokes; I can still hear my cousin telling me, “Your mother is a horse.” I found this parental model completely normal up until adolescence. And the legacy of it has been that, in my eyes, women are more powerful than men. Deep down, I think I go looking for men who are weaker than me.
SCIAMMA: My parents had me very young, in 1978, while they were still in school. From the beginning they adopted a pretty open-minded model: When I was very small, my father stayed at home and my mother went out to work. This was typical of a generation that aspired to a new way of life. But their roles soon reversed, and in the end I grew up in a more traditional environment. I am 100% the child of an era in which the feeling that you could be whoever you wanted yielded the hope that relationships could be remade as well. Many couples suffered from this misunderstanding; their initial, ambitious pact didn’t survive. And I am not the only one to make these judgments, now that I am of an age where I can see my parents as individuals and put them in a particular context. I’ve heard them say it themselves: My mother has said to my father, “We drifted.”
What you are describing is not too far off from what Annie writes about in A Frozen Woman.
SCIAMMA: Exactly! [Laughs.] Incidentally, it was my mother who brought Annie’s work into my life. That this transmission came from my mother is no small thing because it was usually my father who prescribed our cultural tastes, whereas my mother was more subtle. But she’s the one who gave me A Frozen Woman[ii], when I was very young. I don’t think I understood very much of it. … When I reread it last summer, it was a shock: I saw that she had been trying to tell me something by giving me that book to read. In the space of a lifetime some books are vital, but it can take a while to figure out which ones they are.
ERNAUX: That’s a book that was published at a moment when feminism was ebbing a bit. It was 1981: Mitterrand had just got into power, Yvette Roudy and Gisèle Halimi had been given important positions [respectively: Minister for Women’s Rights under Prime Minister Mauroy, and MP]; it seemed as if everything we’d fought for in terms of women’s rights had been obtained. At that time I received a letter from Benoîte Groult [a French journalist and novelist] telling me that I was fighting the wrong battle. It was very disappointing. When I went on the television show “Aujourd’hui Madame” on Channel 2 I was even insulted by some female readers who asked me why I’d had children.
SCIAMMA: I didn’t know A Frozen Woman had been attacked that way.
ERNAUX: Simple Passion[iii] was as well, but that sold well in bookshops. Today, the themes developed in A Frozen Woman are still not considered legitimate concerns, although the concept of “mental overload” has become well known.
What role did Annie’s books play in your youth, Céline?
SCIAMMA: They helped me understand things from my childhood, like shame, for instance. Because childhood is marked by shame, whether it be social or otherwise. They are also texts that enabled me to extrapolate myself — reading them, I felt like I could access the thoughts of grown-up women, like I’d found documentary material for apprehending the future. Then the year I took the bac, La Place [published in 1986 and winner of the Prix Renaudot] was on the exam. It was really something to live in the same city as the author. They give you a book, and then on Sunday down at the greengrocers someone points out a woman and says, “That’s Annie Ernaux.” All of a sudden the image of this woman writer becomes incarnate, turns into flesh.
ERNAUX: I never thought of that!
SCIAMMA: Apart from children’s writers like Susie Morgenstern or Bernadette Després [the illustrator of “Tom-Tom and Nana”] — whose voices are just as important, in my opinion — you are no doubt the first living female writer whose work I read.
So how do you become a female writer, or filmmaker? Is creation a form of transgression for a woman?
ERNAUX: I wrote my first manuscript when I was 22, based on the material that would one day become A Girl’s Story,[iv] and it was rejected by editors. The years that followed were a typical succession of events in a woman’s life: abortion, marriage, pregnancy, unfinished degrees. … With two young children, writing receded to the distant horizon, but I never gave up on it. In my 30s, when things were no longer working with my husband, I felt like I had nothing to lose. Without consulting anyone, I started writing Cleaned Out,[v] which Gallimard would publish in 1974. When that book came out, my mother, my in-laws and my fellow teachers no longer saw me the same way. It was as if I had given birth behind everyone’s backs! But the material conditions of my life remained the same. I struggled for a pretty long time, until I started cleaning out my own life.
SCIAMMA: For me it was very different. In a very fluid way I managed to structure my life around the work of writing and creating, things I had always aspired to. It was an incredible luxury. I’m not inoculated against the norm, and that expresses itself sometimes through renunciation, like refusing to have a family, for instance. But these are decisions I made lucidly.
ERNAUX: Do you not think that your early awareness of your desires freed you from a lot of things?
SCIAMMA: Definitely.
ERNAUX: Because for me, it was clear from the age of 20 that I wanted to devote my life to literature. But I was caught by the ass…
Is the solitude of writing the opposite of the collective aspect of making a film?
SCIAMMA: The division isn’t as clear as that. The advantage of film is that it includes a little of all the pleasures: Initially you write by yourself, then you’re 30 people on a set for two months, and then you’re in a room with only one other person, in a conversation with an editor. And finally, you’re on the road on your own. So for me, cinema is both solitary and collective. But it’s like that in any artistic practice, no? In any case, if I had to devote myself to one particular activity, it would be writing; that’s my favorite part. Film is very physical. There’s a lot of heavy machinery involved. Even if there’s a lot of joy in it, I don’t know if I see myself doing it my whole life.
ERNAUX: To be honest, writing is solitary from start to finish.
You have both made work around the theme of romantic love. Céline, in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” you depict a politics of love founded on equality. Do you think equality as a romantic utopia is more likely to arise in love between women?
SCIAMMA: What I know for sure is that heterosexuality is a culture that legislates relationships in a very forceful way. We lesbians can escape more from this kind of prefabricated framework, but that doesn’t mean we always manage to. In the case of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,”[vi] a narrative set in the 18th century, equality is only possible between two women. Film structures our imagination, especially our romantic imagination. A story about equality between a man and a woman is completely possible … because it’s a story! [Laughs.] But in fact there are very few. In French cinema, we are, alas, too accustomed to stories driven by conflict. As a director, I try to elaborate other kinds of narratives because I know my own point of view is haunted by the conventional modes of telling a story. In my next film, in which I work with a lot of children, I decided not to have them act out conflict-based scenarios. That’s what interests me about equality: What happens when two people agree with each other? What kind of story does that tell? Often, at the end of a romantic comedy, after a series of conflicts, the two main characters agree and sign a contract. But what are we saying if they agree from the outset? What kind of story are we then weaving?
In Simple Passion, the passion of the title resembles a form of enslavement. Annie, is a romantic relationship necessarily a form of alienation?
ERNAUX: Yes, but my book introduces a form of distancing toward this kind of alienating relationship. For that matter I should say that Danielle Arbid’s film adaptation emphasizes the heteronormativity of this relationship by glossing over the difference of age in the original, in which the narrator is 10 years older than her lover. The book was massively misunderstood when it came out. They compared me to Madame Bovary. But Madame Bovary is a fictional character! And I am not; I am the person holding the pen. The response from the male critics was especially shocking. One even called me Madame Ovary. A male author would never have come in for this kind of critique! Did they rebuke Goethe for writing The Sorrows of Young Werther? Men have the right to write about passion without anyone giving them a hard time, but not women. They have to stay in their place and be loved (or not)!
SCIAMMA: For me, Simple Passion is first and foremost a book that describes the lucidity of an experience of alienation. That’s why so many people can identify with the narrator. At the end of the book she reunites with herself, finds wholeness, thanks to that final sentence: “When I was a child, luxury was fur coats, evening dresses, and villas by the sea. Later on, I thought it meant leading the life of an intellectual. Now I feel that it is also being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman” [trans. Tanya Leslie]. If I had to make a film of your book, I think I would begin with that final phrase.
In your first film, “Water Lilies,” you show the degree to which heterosexual norms can alienate young girls whose sexuality is just beginning to awaken.
SCIAMMA: The film[vii] was meant to be an analysis of femininity through the perspective of three young girls. I wanted to talk about desire more than love: That’s a step we often tend to skip over. Whereas if there’s one thing we remember forever, in our lives, it’s the road that leads to the first kiss. … What was really seen as dodgy at the time was that among these choreographies of desire, the film included a lesbian desire felt by the character Marie, played by Pauline Acquart. Floriane, played by Adèle Haenel, isn’t the mean girl who rebuffs Marie’s desire for her — rather, she’s the pretty girl condemned, in a way, to heterosexuality.
ERNAUX: What was the reception of “Water Lilies” like?
SCIAMMA: It was well received. It has to be said that we were at Cannes, we gave all the outward signs of being rich! [Laughs.] Ever since, the way we look at certain aspects of the film has evolved, for me as well as the audience. I realized about three years ago that the scene I had filmed in which the character Anne, played by Louise Blachère, has sex for the first time was actually a rape scene, though it had never been called that — just as in A Girl’s Story you describe a rape without putting that word to it. But when the film came out in 2007, what made people cry out with disgust during the screenings was that at the end of the scene, Anne spits in the boy’s mouth. That was the scandal: a woman spitting in a man’s mouth. What’s funny is that Adèle [Haenel] told me that when she went to show the film six months ago in a high school, she saw the kids applauding that part.
Another unsettling moment in your work, Céline, is the servant’s abortion in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” It’s like a very gentle counterpoint to the “happening” that you, Annie, describe several times in your books, in all its crudeness and violence.
ERNAUX: It’s very rare to see an abortion depicted. In my book Happening [Gallimard, 2000], I wrote, “I don’t believe there is a single museum in the world whose collection features a work called The Abortionist’s Studio” [trans. Tanya Leslie].
SCIAMMA: That line is exactly what encouraged me to imagine this scene! The idea of filming it came to me progressively. The breakthrough came with the idea of introducing a child who would console the young woman having the abortion. I thought that scene was already sufficiently troubling to resonate with everyone, women who have aborted, those who haven’t, those who have children, those who don’t.
By showing Marianne painting this scene, the film immediately poses the question of how to represent such a “happening.”
SCIAMMA: To prepare for the film, I did a lot of research on women artists. It made me very melancholy to have only discovered this body of work in adulthood. I wish it could have accompanied me much earlier in my life. But our art, our bodies, our intimate moments were all taken from us. I’ve seen self-portraits of 17th-century women showing their teeth, eating, getting drunk. … Less than half of them are naked on a fainting couch! A painting of two women smoking while they read a book — honestly, it does you good.
You have both always declared yourselves to be feminists, even during a time, not that long ago, when doing so was much less accepted than it is today. How did you become feminists?
ERNAUX: I think I was influenced on a deep level by my mother, the very model of a strong woman. And then for me, reading The Second Sex in 1958 was very formative — it changed my life. Even if we didn’t use the word yet, I can say that I became a feminist in 1958. At the same time, I noticed the degree to which Beauvoir’s feminism wasn’t really practical in everyday life and marriage! If in the beginning of the 1960s we could not imagine that one day abortion would be legal, we did know that the pill had been invented [in the mid-1950s] as well as forbidden. But we didn’t make the connection between contraception and the feminist struggle. At the time, for instance, Beauvoir wasn’t interested in the pill. She didn’t care.
Was your feminism confirmed after that?
ERNAUX: I was in fact very interested in writers that you could call feminist: George Sand, Virginia Woolf. For my diplôme d’études supérieures, the equivalent of a master’s, I chose to study “women and love in Surrealism.” And then, later on, I took part in the 1970s feminist movements.
Were you an activist with the Mouvement de libération des femmes [the French women’s liberation movement]?
ERNAUX: I wasn’t part of the MLF, but I was part of the Ligue du droit de femmes [the League of Women’s Rights], Gisèle’s Halimi’s Choisir [Choose], and the MLAC [Movement for the Freedom of Abortion and Contraception]. At the time, I was married and lived in Annecy. My husband did not want me to go and I basically had to sneak out! It was the early ’70s; there was this kind of oppressiveness. The slogan at the time was “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” If I had hung up a poster with that slogan on it at home, my husband would have immediately torn it down. In these movements, there were a lot of us married women; we really felt like we were remaking the world. It was also during this period that the concept of sorority was born, though we didn’t give it that name. Groups of women — I had never experienced that. Before 1968, it didn’t exist. It was wonderful!
We are living in an ambiguous time, between feminist gains and the increased repression of social movements. There’s been a rebirth of hope, but should we keep it in check?
ERNAUX: I’m staying cautious. In any case, there are still mountains left to move. But what is going on right now gives me even more hope. For us, as women, we have to be vigilant. The fight is endless. But then why shouldn’t it be? Fighting is good.
SCIAMMA: There are two different scales: that of our individual lives, and of our collective struggles. We can fight for alternatives, or embody them from day to day, making our lives a kind of laboratory in which we can experiment with other ways of making community. So yes, we are going to fight all our lives, but it will enrich us, it will call upon the entirety of ourselves. That is what I find promising going forward. What we have to do is see feminism as a complete reconfiguration of the world.
This interview took place on December 8, 2020, and was carried out by Lucie Geffroy and Emanuelle Josse, co-founders of La Déferlante, a French feminist journal in which the piece originally appeared. It has been translated by Lauren Elkin and lightly edited.
[i] “Tomboy” (2011), Céline Sciamma’s second full-length film, centers on a 10-year-old called Laure who pretends to be a boy while hanging out with a group of other kids. Over the course of the summer Laure becomes Mickaël, until the ruse completely falls apart.
[ii] In A Frozen Woman (Gallimard, 1981), the narrator describes how, as a brilliant young student, she was progressively entrapped by the constraints of marital life and motherhood. She conveys an implacable description of the mental load: the work of organizing the domestic space, which still falls mainly to women.
[iii] Simple Passion, published in 1991 by Gallimard and adapted for the cinema in 2020 by Danielle Arbid, is the clinical account of a relationship the narrator embarks on for several months with a younger man, which is shot through with the power of all-consuming passion, especially that of sexual desire.
[iv] A Girl’s Story (Gallimard, 2016) is the book Annie Ernaux circled around writing all her life. It recounts, 60 years later, the memory of the first time she had sex: a rape that was never named as such.
[v] In Cleaned Out (Gallimard, 1974), a portrait of her childhood in Normandy, Annie Ernaux develops the central themes in her work: the importance of the figure of the mother and the feeling of being torn between social classes: that of her parents, former factory workers, and the bourgeois intellectual milieu that she discovers through her studies.
[vi] “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2019) depicts the meeting and impossible love between two young women, a painter (Noémie Merlant) and her model (Adèle Haenel), in 18th-century Brittany.
[vii] “Water Lilies” (2007) is Céline Sciamma’s first full-length film. Marie, Floriane and Anne are 15 years old. Impatient to become women, they take their ennui with them to the benches of the municipal pool and their first high school parties. But desire emerges where they don’t expect it and turns their lives upside down.
✺ Published in “Issue 1: Egg” of The Dial
PHOTOS: “Annie Ernaux in 2022 (8 av 11)" by Frankie Fouganthin (via Wikimedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0) & "Céline Sciamma, the director of the film Bande de filles in the Protocol Room the European Parliament in Strasbourg" by European Parliament (via Wikimedia, is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
