Mémoire de fille (A Girl’s Story), Judith Godrèche’s letter

“I was thinking about what my next project would be, after working on the series Icon Of French Cinema followed by the short film Moi aussi (Me Too), when someone suggested I read Mémoire de fille (A Girl’s Story). I had read some of Annie Ernaux’s work, but not that book, so I started reading it, and everything fell into place… Annie’s perspective on the world, on male dominance, on the urge to belong to a group… 

Annie uses her personal experiences to shed light on group dynamics, and in doing so, she offers an opportunity for self-discovery. She regards what has happened to her as something to be understood in sociological and historical terms, even though it stems from her personal life. She transcends uniqueness in every sense of the word. 

Starting from her “I” comes a “we.” This book enabled me to consider certain things—my relationship with the world, with society—and to channel them into the place where my passion for cinema comes from. 

When she was promoting Mémoire de fille (A Girl’s Story) in 2016, Annie said that she wanted to connect with the 58-year-old girl through writing. This encounter with the past was difficult for her, it was a painful process; as she puts it, “we flee from certain books,” but she managed it. When she placed her trust in me, I asked myself, how am I going to do this too? How am I going to film this encounter that she was courageous enough to undertake with herself? 

Cinema very literally makes reincarnation possible. I can film something that no longer exists—“the other,” the fifty-eight-year-old girl—and, via these two versions of the same woman, separated by fifty years, and their voices, I attempt to recreate Annie’s original gesture. That movement. To reconnect with the person we once were, in order to be able to move forward. 

I wanted to film this 70-year-old woman’s face too. I didn’t want to reduce this story to the embodiment of youth; on screen, I wanted the writer’s face as it is today to fill the entire frame. 

I wanted the camera to be subjective, to allow the audience to get as close as possible to the character—to Annie—and her journey. I wanted to see what she sees, so that the audience could truly be in her situation. I worked a lot on this in the early stages, to ensure that she was never seen through H, the male character’s, gaze. 

I thought about how to have a narrative structure that would exclude any sexual overtones. 

Just like in the original book, the challenge is to experience what Annie is experiencing at exactly the same time as her. This same sense of immersion is made possible by Annie Ernaux’s writing. 

I watched a lot of films, especially Fish Tank. This film made a big impression on me when it came out, especially the way in which Andrea Arnold films her young heroine. That said, you’ll notice that the more Annie’s character breaks free, the more the shots change. They become more composed, wider, more mature in a way—they evolve alongside her. This continues right up to the film’s final shot, where the two Annies face each other. Throughout the entire storyboarding process, I stayed focused on the character’s emotional arc and sense of perception. 

Annie Ernaux graciously granted me the rights to her book. She entrusted them to me. It was a gift. I had to do something good with it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. During filming, we had a photo of her on the set. She was watching over us—and vice versa—as we told her story.“