Antoni Collot
In the opening shot, a father is lying in bed and asks his son, “Jojo, have you
learned your poetry?” Jojo is Georges Bataille as a child. Antoni Collot has set
himself the seemingly impossible challenge of inventing the childhood of the
author of Le bleu du ciel. In a similar vein to the radiant Paul est Mort (FID 2018),
he rises to the challenge by cobbling together a three-storey anachronism that
takes the film away from classic biographical narratives. The first storey does not
seek portray the young Bataille or imagine what the future writer might have been,
but watches a contemporary child live, studying his experiences from the point of
view of Bataille’s way of thinking, of his vision of the world. The childhood scenes
thus freed from any form of prefiguration of the man to come, are the stations
of a lesson in things: Jojo catches crayfish, builds a cabin, makes a big bonfire,
discovers the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch… On the second floor, the editing
short-circuits times and ages: as a counterpoint to the immediate present of
childhood, moments in the lives of Jojo, his father Joseph and his housekeeper
Pernette, Collot adds the sound of the intermittent flow of a radio interview
between Bataille and a journalist. On the third floor of this anachronistic rocket,
the filmmaker embodies Joseph Bataille, the father blinded and paralysed by
syphilis, putting in his mouth the ideas and words of the future writer. Hideous
Jojo, lewd and unholy – but loving and loved… It’s as though Bataille, like us
marvelling in the child’s joy and intelligence, was trying to rediscover what and
who he had been, the sovereignty of his experiences. “Experience should never
seek authority elsewhere than in itself”. For the duration of a sequence, the
radio becomes a ghost at the sleeping child’s bedside, to borrow from the writer
the maxim of the film itself, the formidable ease with which he was able to free
himself from the pitfalls of biopics and the fatigue of the guardians of the temple
of the Bataille doctrine – until, like Jojo, we lose ourselves in the stars.
(Cyril Neyrat)