At the origin of L’Enchanteur, the passion of two novelists, Maria Pourchet and François-Henri Désérable, for the work and personality of the writer Romain Gary (1914-1980). And their fascination with the famous literary deception engineered by the author of La Promesse de l’aube (Gallimard, 1960) who made people believe that, behind his pseudonym Emile Ajar, discovered thanks to the success of La Vie avant soi (Mercure of France, Goncourt Prize 1975), there was someone other than himself hiding. Beyond just the literary world, the mystification held public opinion in suspense in 1975 and fueled numerous articles in the press of the time. She inspired the Pourchet-Désérable duo to write a sparkling fantasy fiction script, directed by Philippe Lefebvre.
The screenwriters started from an anecdote told by Romain Gary: a student one day introduced herself to him to say “Emile Ajar, it’s you”. The young woman would have discovered the deception before it was revealed. It is around this character, baptized Adèle and played with delicious false ingenuity by the resident of the Comédie-Française Claire de La Rüe du Can, that the fiction is built, which unfolds by following her investigation step by step.
Barely got off the train that took her from her city of Nice to the capital, the literature student, who is preparing a thesis on “The re-enchantment of reality in the work of Romain Gary”, rushes to the premises of Gallimard to leave a letter addressed to the writer she reveres, although his popularity is in decline. The approach proving to be in vain and the young woman not lacking in determination, she was hired as a waitress in a café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés frequented by her idol.
“The World” mentioned several times
Initially feigning indifference, the sixty-year-old writer, played with relish by Charles Berling – for whom a thin mustache, a line of kohl under his eyes and costumes taken from Romain Gary’s wardrobe are enough to appear campy. convincing the character – takes a liking to his young admirer. Who revealed his discovery to him: the winner of the Goncourt Prize in 1956 for Les Racines du ciel would be the victim of plagiarism on the part of a certain Emile Ajar, his book La Vie avant soi taking up entire sentences and figures of speech from his novels.
Amused by the situation, the mischievous Gary lets the young girl carry out her investigation while opening the doors to her world, even going so far as to make her meet his little cousin, Paul Pavlowitch (Pierre Perrier), secret “double” of ‘Emile Ajar for the media. Note that the newspaper Le Monde is mentioned several times in this fiction through articles devoted to “the affair” and the presence in several scenes of the character of Yvonne Baby (1931-2022), at the time head of the department World Culture (played by Alexandra Mercouroff).
Mixing real anecdotes and purely fictional scenes, The Enchanter seduces with its lightness of tone, but also with its crafted dialogues where connoisseurs of the writer’s work will have fun finding the references.
