I had never seen her like that, literally glued to her computer screen in front of In therapy continuously. It looked like me in front breaking Bad five years ago. She swallowed the 32 episodes of the second season in one weekend. From time to time I passed my head over his shoulder, the time to shed a tear: “They’re going strong in the melody this season!” The 20-year-old girl who has breast cancer and an autistic little brother, the old boss who is responsible for the suicide of his employee and also for the accident of his little brother, a long time ago, but everything goes back, psychoanalysis that bring things up, the little boy who gets bullied at school because he’s fat and his parents are getting divorced.
With Chirac, trouble happened in squadrons, with Nakache and Toledano, they come in pairs, a basic psychoanalytic unit. Luckily the actors are excellent, sometimes sublime (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the concrete scripts, fortunately the staging remains discreet, avoiding even the minimalism that the repeated face-to-face situation could have imposed. And then the decor is very accurate; between the sofa reserved for patients and the shrink’s chair, there is a coffee table on which is placed a box of Kleenex, César for the best accessory in the best French series of the year.
Sunday at noon, he still had five or six episodes to watch when he had to go to brunch with friends we didn’t yet know very well. Surprise on arrival: their apartment overlooks the Bataclan. While I was being told about the scene of November 13, 2015 as they had experienced it from their windows, Dora made the acquaintance, I’ll give you a thousand, of a psychoanalyst, but a Jungian. Neither one nor two, here they are connected to the second season from In Therapy.
When she got home, Dora slipped on two or three more episodes. I understood that she did not look at them in continuity, but by patients: she really wanted to know what had happened to the lawyer (Eye Haïdara) whom her father never considered and who finds herself at 40 still no guy, still no child, and who blames the whole world for pushing her to have an abortion when she was 17. Dora finds her so beautiful. I prefer the one who has cancer (Suzanne Lindon).
True violence and colonial perversion
Monday morning, before leaving for work, Dora swallowed the last two episodes, like mini croissants. I don’t know if she was crying because it was too beautiful how love triumphs over everything or because it was too sad that the series was over. At noon, I finished correcting the chapter where the son of Léon Daudet commits suicide instead of going to assassinate his father. Too late to attend the inauguration of the expo Jews and Muslims at the Museum of the History of Immigration at the Palais de la Porte Dorée. So I went to see Batman. A frankly uninteresting film, I found. I was so disappointed that I called the museum to see if they could let me in. They were nice.
I visited the exhibition, crossing the shame of France, that of Drumont elected deputy of Algiers, that of the massacre of Sétif, from one photo to another, the France of real violence and colonial perversion consisting of pitting the Arabs against the Jews who did not need that to be persecuted.
Between the overwhelming documents, the filmed archives capture the attention. De Gaulle with his famous “elite people, self-confident and dominating” which smacks of ordinary anti-Semitism. Mitterrand with his forgotten “And I wonder if we are not already a little Arab!” who, through this smile of complicity, this way of pronouncing the word “arrrâââbe”, and the exaggerated reaction of the public, would be the manifestation of subliminal racism. Painful exposition of the facts. And reassuring evolution of things. Nevertheless.