Writing Life – Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students: Claire Simon’s touching documentary explores the universality of Ernaux’s writing
The director enters French classrooms to film students’ discussions of Annie Ernaux’s intimate writing, allowing the teenagers’ profound observations to speak for themselves.
Reviewed from the 2025 Venice Film Festival
Annie Ernaux – the first French woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022 – is known for a style she calls ‘l’ecriture plate’, or ‘flat writing’. She abstains from flowery metaphors in favour of deceptively simple descriptive prose, writing that’s all the more affecting for its starkness. The same might be said of Claire Simon, whose unobtrusive observational documentaries focus on the people who breathe life into ordinary institutions.
Here Simon visits various schools around France and French Guiana, capturing pupils’ responses to Annie Ernaux’s memoirs and auto-fiction, both in the classroom and in less formal settings, like the bus stop. Simon has established herself as a committed chronicler of educational environments from Playtime (1998) to last year’s Elementary (2024), and her affection for her teenage subjects is palpable. As with her critically acclaimed film Our Body (2023), an unflinching study of the gynaecological ward of a Parisian hospital, Writing Life takes an overly feminist perspective. The students, mostly girls, speak candidly and eloquently about female sexuality, social class and agency in relation to Ernaux’s work. Rather than looming over them like an overbearing teacher, Simon’s camera observes them in close-up at their eye level, as if we are also participants in these conversations.
The intimacy of Ernaux’s writing encourages the teenagers to consider the commonality of their experiences, both with the author and with each other. Simon doesn’t interview any of them as such; we don’t even learn most of their names. But engaging with Ernaux’s deeply personal texts, from her recollection of an obsessive love affair in Simple Passion to the discovery of a sister who died before she was born in The Other Girl, draws out the teens’ extraordinary stories and profound insight. Some of the Black French Guianese students recognise parallels between Ernaux’s relationship with working class patois to speaking French Guianese Creole, leading them to teach their white teacher Creole slang. Another girl relays her experience of feeling unable to talk to her parents about contraception, while two boys initially laugh with embarrassment at the explicitness of the writing, but are subdued by a female classmate reading aloud from Happening, Ernaux’s harrowing account of her illegal abortion.
It’s notable that very few of the students have negative responses to these books, and one can’t help but wonder if more disparaging comments were left on the cutting room floor. But the film feels neither hagiographic nor dishonest, illustrating the enduring universality of Ernaux’s writing, and, as trite as it might sound, the transformative power of reading.