Daughter’s Memory: a moving passing of the baton (review)

Judith Godrèche brings Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel to the screen. By offering the leading role to her own daughter, Tess shows the extent of her talent as she takes on this not-simple challenge with flying colors.

Summer 1958. Annie, 17 and a half years old, leaves her family in Yvetot for the first time to work as an instructor in a summer camp. There she discovers desire, the view of others and emancipation, but also the violence of a sexual relationship that she is unable to name as such and the weight of what people will say about it. Situations for which neither her education nor her environment had prepared her. Several decades later, having become a writer, she returns to this initiating experience from which her body nevertheless had such difficulty recovering.