The French have a fondness for sticking it to the bourgeoisie – épater les bourgeois they call it. They might not have the popular cultural powerhouses of Hollywood but from art, literature. architecture and cinema, each successive generation has had an intellectual or group of individuals who shaped cultural evolution by challenging convention, even or especially when society finds it offensive.
Voltaire, Van Gogh (a dutchman), Marcel Duchamp of the Dada movement, Jean-Paul Sartre the existentialist philosopher. Jean-Luc Godard in films, to name a few. One of their foremost shock artists has recently been hoisted on his own petard.
The bad boy writer Michel Houellebecq is seeking to impose a ban on the imminent release of a sexually explicit film staring none other than himself. The movie, “Kirac 27” is by Dutch arthouse filmmaker Stefan Ruitenbeek. Houellebecq is the protagonist and he seems to less offended by what he himself does but more by what is said about him.
The trailer of the movie shows a shirtless Houellebecq kissing a young woman in bed. All harmless stuff. A bit of slap and tickle. Carry on Writing. The Confessions of a French Intellectual.
The offence taken was the off-camera commentary by Ruitenbeek saying that Houellebecq had written to him complaining that his honeymoon in Morocco had been called off after his wife had “spent a month booking prostitutes” for her depressed husband.
Not your average honeymoon.
It was not the scenes of Houellebecq having intimate relationships with several women that got the writer so hot and bothered that he reached out for his lawyers. Their lawyers Angelique Beres and Maia Kantor said in a statement that the film made ‘serious and false statements about the couple which violently attacked their dignity.’
Director Ruitenbeek spoke to the Vice news site that the idea to shoot a hard-core movie was all the idea of Houellebecq and his wife inspired by “Honeypot”, a previous film by the “Kirac” collective, about a real life right wing commentator having sex with a left wing liberal for the experience. Sleeping with the enemy, kind of.
According to the article in Vice, Lysis Houellebecq told Ruitenbeek that if he wanted to do something for her husband “you’ll have to turn him into a porn star”.
Michel Houellebecq having a harem of Dutch art hoes is gonna haunt me for a while pic.twitter.com/AcdJCNmOgt
— // (@rylefou) January 24, 2023
According to Ruitenbeek, Houellebecq was bit of stud. A Rocco with a brain.
“It was incredible, they did all kinds of positions,” he said. “He’s very good in bed.”
The subsequent film is a hybrid of Jacquie et Michel and Daft Punk but with reflections on mortality and cultural legacy.
Ruitenbeek’s recent films have explored the similarities between right wing ideologies and extreme wokism, both of which come with ingrained judgement systems.
The shoot lasted days in Amsterdam and Paris, Houellebecq getting jiggy with sexual partners, four in total, in between cigarette breaks, philosophy lectures (he is French, after all) and visits to restaurants.
Houellebecq is a controversial writer, who specialises in tapping into right-wing fears over Islam in France. One of his recent works features a washed up intellectual who converts to Islam which has become the dominant political force in France, because it is the easy option and offers the certainties that the liberal left cannot provide.
The Union of Mosques in France told AFP last month it was suing Houellebecq for discrimination, hate speech and inciting violence in remarks to an interviewer.
He has been seen as a contender for the Nobel Literature Prize though his reactionary and anti-feminist tirades put a stop to that. His critics say that he is all about reactionary rants at the expense of literary merit and a faux anti-style. His books sell by the truck load, though. This anti-style is “le style Houellebecq.” Submission was a best-seller, having sold more than 120,000 copies in its first week alone. It has now sold a million copies.
The art collective itself, KIRAC, led by Ruitenbeek, is no stranger to controversy. In a previous film, they convinced a right-wing philosopher Sid Lukkassen to get piggy with Jini van Rooijen, an OnlyFans model and philosophy student, two apparently mutually compatible disciplines. Lukkassen also attempted to ban the publication of the film, a piece entitled “Honey Pot”, in which van Rooijen ends up rejecting Lukkassen. Ruitenbeek released the footage despite these objections.
You get the impression that Houellebecq didn’t think this one through when he bared more than his soul for cultural relevance.
