The 34th Cambridge Film Festival got off to a strong start with an engaging and delightfully quirky offering from French director Guillaume Nicloux (who stayed for a very good natured Q and A). Deliberately and provocatively blurring the distinction between fiction and documentary, the conceit is that France’s great literary figure is snatched away by a gang of bodybuilding kidnappers. Houellebecq plays himself (or at least a version of himself) stripped away of all public stature.

Indeed we are first introduced to him, pre-kidnap, discussing the banalities of interior decoration (he’s opting for parquet flooring), bumping into friends, chatting about Mozart and endlessly puffing on cigarettes. He casts a rather dissolute, shambolic figure weary of life perhaps. It is high in his penthouse apartment that he is brought low.

…the kidnap throws Houellebecq into a world where heart and muscle replace head…

For reasons never made clear, he is gently kidnapped by a trio of unlikely snatchers: the burly Luc who has read Houellebecq’s biography of horror writer H.P. Lovercraft, and two brothers, one of whom is a champion ‘free fighter’ – both are muscle bound heavies who nevertheless seem to have a gentle nature. What follows seems like a fly-on-the-wall account of the author’s incarceration in the cosy bungalow belonging to the brothers’ elderly parents.

Though handcuffed, the kidnap throws Houellebecq into a world where heart and muscle replace head. Many strange and farcical events follow. Houellebecq, sanguine about his capture, makes more demands than the kidnappers – for Spanish wine, cigarette lighters and even a local ‘escort’. Though Nicloux’s iconoclasm of Houellebecq may not have the same bite in this country, where the author is not so revered, the film is a funny, intimate and constantly surprising mockumentary.

The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq screened on 28th Aug at the Cambridge Film Festival.

httpvh://youtu.be/7-Ap1g83Dg4