Le Hérisson [The Hedgehog] (2009). Director: Mona Achache

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Gráinne Lucey for her meticulous work on revising the translation of this essay.

Notes

1 The transposition of the diary to the camera also symbolizes the transposition of Muriel Barbery's book into film by the director Mona Achache.

2 Unless otherwise indicated, in what follows, the italics are taken from the original texts.

3 One might assume that Paloma, with the aid of her camera, is trying to remedy this pathology of representation: she is trying to capture and hold this image of her mother, to create objective perceptions that can augment the subjective representations that are too weak, evanescent, due to a deficiency in the framing structure.

4 There will be yet another black screen at Renée's death, and this is not surprising—indeed, it appears when Renée, struck by a car, dies. The scene is filmed by a subjective camera, we see it through Renée's eyes, with a voice-over of her final thoughts. When Kakuro discovers that she is dead, he covers her with his shirt. Black screen.

5 In the book, one sees the encounter between the psychoanalyst—Lacanian as is appropriate—and Paloma, who completely unmasks him, leaving him naked. It is an amusing scene, as it's surely fun to turn the psychoanalyst into an object of ridicule, as has been done any number of times on screen. But perhaps it is the banality of this scene that resulted in it not appearing in the film, or, as I prefer to believe, this denotes a certain empathy on the part of the film-maker towards psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts, all of her manifest criticism notwithstanding.