“I know nothing of my origins. I was born in Paris to an unknown mother, and my father photographed heroines. Shortly before his death, he confided to me that my existence owed itself to a movie kiss. My father gave few details about his job. He filled slim notebooks with quick, shapeless scribbles, hastily jotting down notes that served him on other shoots. His life was light. He only thought about it, and at night, he dreamt of it. Sometimes, he would get up in the morning and say before anything else, ‘I’ve imagined a natural gray that would go very well for the sea scene.’ Then he would kiss me wordlessly and I would spend the entire day with the secret of that gray sculpted by him amidst a dream.”
As a still photographer, Gilles Hector’s father had the gift of sensing actors’ moments of surrender. He knew how to capture on their faces a downfall, a silent anger, the slight trace of a filming incident. After his death, Gilles realizes that his life full of absent beings makes him happy. His sole paternal inheritance is being sensitive to light.
It is then that he reunites with Mayliss, whom he had met at his father’s funeral two years earlier. Gradually, their relationship takes shape and Gilles lives inversely to his previous life. One day, he discovers a stockpile of photos and some film reels in his father’s office. On one of them, the actress bears an almost exact resemblance to Mayliss. Was their meeting truly by chance?
In his latest novel, Eric Fottorino offers tender, almost fragile words to describe a time when the world remains a mystery, and where love can still appear as a risky game.
Fnac in Nice – Saturday, February 9 at 4 pm
Meet with Eric Fottorino
Author and editor-in-chief of the newspaper Le Monde
about his book “Cinema Kisses” (ed. Gallimard) – Fémina Prize 2007
