A year earlier, in February 2022, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse called Michel Houellebecq, “visionary” according to her, at the French Academy. At the same time in the very serious Review of the two worldsLaurent Wauquiez praised the one he called “our last romantic”.
A few years earlier, in April 2019, the writer received, from the hands of Emmanuel Macron, President, the Legion of Honor in the very elegant village hall of the Elysée. What happened to the awesome author ofExtension of the field of struggle, who so aptly described the malaise or even the misery of contemporary man, for the year 2023 to begin like this, in a court? Yesterday idolized for his ability to feel, to narrate the decline of French civilization, here is Houellebecq entangled in a sordid business mixing pornography and prostitutes.
A man “bruised by the situation and the media coverage”, “forced to cancel several public performances” and whose confidence would have been “abused”. Has anyone seen Michel Houellebecq? He is, however, the author ofAnnihilate who is described in this way by his lawyer, this Wednesday, March 1, during the hearing opposing him and his wife, Lysis Houellebecq, to Stefan Ruitenbeek, director of a film for adults in which they are the main protagonists.
The source of the couple’s anger: a trailer released at the end of January on the Internet, in which Michel Houellebecq appears shirtless in bed with a young woman during intimate moments. Even more serious, according to the spouses, the director’s comment accompanying the video, the latter explaining that the writer would have written to him that “his planned honeymoon in Morocco had been canceled” and that “his wife had spent a month to arrange prostitutes in advance”.
In an open letter to the Dutch director, Michel Houellebecq thus described a “trailer which irremediably damages [s]in private life, [s]honor, but above all, what is even more serious, to [s]a wife, devastated by the lies” that Ruitenbeek would have spread about her. To the point that this event would constitute, according to the couple’s lawyers, a “total cataclysm in the life of the spouses”, marking a “before and after”.
It is hard to imagine the writer with the lively and acerbic pen being fooled in this way. The fault of a contract deemed “indigent” and a lack of translation into French, according to the prosecution lawyers who explain that the plaintiffs would thus have been deceived by the director about his true intentions. “If they could have been informed, from the start of the project, that Stefan Ruitenbeek would use the images shot in the context of such a story, they would never have given him the slightest consent”.
“Porn is always a good idea”
Problem: not only would the spouses have consented, according to the director’s defence, to participate in the shooting and production of this “artistic, fictional, documentary, performative, essayist, erotic and pornographic” film including “sexual acts or genitals”. But they reportedly even allowed the director to film their image and release it, along with any content “obtained by [ce dernier] and his team in the period from November 1, 2022 to December 31, 2023”. One of the articles of the contract stipulating only that “the faces of Michel Houellebecq and Lysis Houellebecq will never be shown together in the same shot with images of the penis of Michel and of the vagina of Lysis. In shots that show their identifiable faces, the aforementioned genitalia will not be visible at all.”
Worse: the wife of Michel Houellebecq would have even insisted “several times” with Stefan Ruitenbeek that her husband and she participate in “a porn film”. At the start of filming, on November 1, 2022, the latter declared in a filmed sequence:
LH: “I want to put him in porn. That’s my motivation. I want to get him into porn. I want him to stop being depressed. And find hope. Even if it’s just for a time.
It’s certainly a better project to offer him to shoot a pornographic scene than to cut the…” [en référence au ruban que Stefan Ruitenbeek avait proposé à Michel Houellebecq de couper lors de l’évènement initial, Miscatonic, à Amsterdam].
SR: It was a stupid idea the ribbon
LH: Porn is always a good idea. It can become another project. I’m looking to shoot a porn scene in Paris with Houellebecq and nobody knows if it will happen or not.
Just offer porn instead. Don’t be afraid to go all out (“go hard”).
SR: Ok let’s do it.”
In addition, according to exchanges of emails and filmed sequences in the file, the spouses seemed to know the working methods of Stefan Ruitenbeek, who had also sent them the film KIRAC episode 23 Honeypotin the same vein and featuring the same actress, Jini, as the one with whom Michel Houellebecq has a sexual relationship filmed as part of the film to be released.
Certainly, the filming was stopped in an “early” way. The author complaining of being permanently filmed, without authorization from him and his wife, and without knowing in what context and under what conditions the “stolen” images would be used. On December 23, 2023, the spouses told the director to end the filming, which was to end… three days later.
“I’m looking for prostitutes in Casablanca and he knows it”
As for the “lies” of which the director is said to have been guilty in his trailer concerning Lysis Houellebecq, they are limited – if we believe the statement of the accusation – to the use of the term “honeymoon”. , deemed “absurd” given that the spouses have been married since 2018… Curiously, the rest of the remarks imputed to Lysis Houellebecq (“his wife had spent a month arranging prostitutes”) are not attacked in law for their falsehood ( as Michel Houellebecq’s letter might have suggested), but for the invasion of privacy they constitute… Here again, the defense presented a WhatsApp exchange with the director and dated early November, in which the writer’s wife indicated “research[r] prostitutes (so cheap) in Casablanca and he knows it”.
Faced with the time constraint imposed by the imminent release of the film (March 11), the spouses seized the emergency judge (judge in chambers). They demanded the sum of 100,000 euros each as compensation for the damage, not to mention the ban on continuing to use the “disputed remarks” and images of the spouses in the trailer and, among other things, the viewing of the film. by the latter before any public dissemination. Lost. In the order issued this Friday, March 3, the judge declared himself incompetent regarding the request to watch the film, and canceled the summons made by the Houellebecq spouses regarding the other grounds – considering that it was defamation. and not an invasion of privacy.