Returning to Reims (Fragments) (Jean-Gabriel Périot, 2021) (Patreon)

It took me a minute to figure out exactly what Périot is up to in this film, but maybe that's because it's the first feature of his I've watched. (I've seen a couple of earlier shorts, which were fairly impressive.) Borrowing both its title and overall premise from the 2009 memoir by Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims is very much about geography as destiny, although perhaps not directly. The Eribon voiceover (read by Adèle Haenel) begins with personal information about the author's mother and father, from whom he as long estranged. When he reconnects with his mother following his father's death, he learns a great deal about her life, and perhaps why his parents were the people they became.

In short, Périot is taking his political cues from Eribon, whose memoir could perhaps be called a sociological novel. As Returning to Reims explores the history of the town, its social and educational stratification, and the forcibly diminished expectations of an entire French generation, Périot arrives at a rather deterministic thesis. Given the inexorable classism and sexism of their time, Eribon's parents were completely typical. The ideological conflicts he had with his father, in particular, were the direct result of social conditioning.

Périot-via-Eribon-via Haenel puts it this way: My father's life, his personality, his subjectivity, were determined by a place and a time, whose harshness and constraints were boundless. This certainly makes Returning to Reims a uniquely French film, in that it channels personal understanding through the unspoken philosophies of Michel Foucault and especially Pierre Bourdieu. Périot's primary intervention as a filmmaker is the assemblage of found footage material that exemplifies Eribon's premise. Some of this material is classic urban ethnography -- workers discussing their lives, documents of how "the other half" lives -- but a lot of it is taken from French narrative cinema. This mixture confused me at first, but it actually makes perfect sense. If we are determined by our cultural conditioning, then "fiction," as a cultural product, is just covert form of documentary.

By the end, Périot is arguing that the failure of the French left (especially the neoliberal technocracy of Mitterand) drove the leftist working classes straight into the arms of Le Pen and the National Front. The claim seems a bit tidy, like a New York Times op-ed explaining why we really, really need to listen to Trump supporters. But otherwise, Returning to Reims is airtight in its organization, arguing precisely what it intends to without a great deal of latitude. If I have mixed feelings about Périot's film, it's because it is completely sure of its assumptions, and doesn't allow much room for a viewer to ruminate on the problems it outlines. This is didactic cinema, to be sure. But even if it is not particularly artistic, it is undeniably artful.