It’s a family story – unique, and yet. A story of transmission, made of silences and sounds. A private story – made public for the first time. It is above all and first a story of the heart, and it is overwhelming. A story that begins with a clearing of the throat and a phone call. Léa Chatauret, 39, film editor, calls her father. Tells him that his podcast is progressing and asks him if he still agrees to speak publicly. Then begins the story of John.
A modest but loving father, this sound engineer with a passion for classical music traveled the world to record the greatest until that day, in Marseille, a few years ago, where everything changed: AVC. His failing heartbeats are soon superimposed on those of Aglaé, who is growing in Léa’s belly, and those of Geneviève (Jean’s mother, 96 years old), hospitalized for heart failure.
Léa Chatauret then feels it: “Something is happening in our bodies and in our hearts. » Especially since his grandmother died while his father, in the same hospital, received his transplant. When she asks him how he is, he replies: “Don’t worry about me, I’m used to dissociating my body from my head. » Like all those who have suffered attacks. Léa Chatauret understands that her intuition – which then made her record her father and grandmother – will not have been in vain.
In the spring, she decided to resume recording. This time she asks her father to reconsider what he had told her about ten years ago – namely that he had been sexually assaulted by his piano teacher, who also directed the choir: “He there was a musical part and then there was the rest: that’s how it started,” Jean confides into the microphone. It was 1962: he was 9 years old. This lasted until 1966, the year he was 13, when he was “fired” – he could no longer work on his piano peacefully.
An intimate word
What does this silence mean in which Jean lived before confiding, belatedly, in his mother, who was unable to hear? To what extent is it constitutive of the man, the son and the father that he is, that he was? And how, having become a mother, can Léa cope with this inheritance? These are some of the questions that his podcast asks, with sensitive intelligence. She signed the production with Samuel Hirsch and was well supported by Silvain Gire – the co-founder and former editorial manager of Arte Radio, who gave way to Perrine Kervran in August – and his team.
While Mozart’s Ave verum and Schubert’s Impromptus resonate in particular, it is the story of Jean that finally resonates so well. A story and an intimate word, as we have said, but a word that it was necessary for Léa Chatauret to make public: “On the one hand, because I hope that this word can be useful to all those who could not speak or be heard. On the other hand, because I think it will be stronger for my father. »
In fact, as Léa Chatauret told us in the middle of summer, her father praised her work. Better still, she is delighted to see him, since then, so literally liberated. Enough to undertake to find other children from the choir of the Petits Chanteurs de la Renaissance of which he was a member and who, perhaps, were, like him, victims of attacks.