The trailer, now available again, is incredible. “Houellebecq is very good in bed,” says the director. And the author: He was depressed and drunk.
Houellebecq in a passionate embrace with a young woman in the trailer for “Kirac 27”Screenshot/Youtube/Kirac
It sounds unbelievable, but it’s true: the most famous French writer Michel Houellebecq starred in an erotic film, regretted it, wanted to have its publication banned and failed with this request before an Amsterdam court on Tuesday afternoon.
“He’s very good in bed,” Dutch filmmaker Stefan Ruitenbeek, who directed the film and is a member of Dutch artist collective Kirac (Keeping It Real Art), said in an interview with Vice magazine after the shoot about the 67-year-old writer known for Novels like “Annihilation” or “Serotonin”, candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Kirac 27 trailer, released in January, was blocked following the lawsuit and was accessible again on Wednesday. Houellebecq is first seen sitting shirtless in a bed, with a band-aid on his chest, smoking, then in black pajamas.
He is lying in bed, probably in a hotel room, with a young woman in a light nightgown next to him. They roll towards each other, kiss and it seems passionate, Houellebecq wraps his arms around the young woman, caresses her, you can see the wedding ring on one hand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlUMCbXP6p8
From the off, the director explains that Houellebecq and his wife had planned a holiday in Morocco, and that his wife, Qianyun Lysis Li from Shanghai, who can also be seen briefly in the trailer, had spent a full month, still from France to clear up prostitutes.
But then they refrained from the trip for fear of being kidnapped by Islamist extremists. Is the boundary between reality and art blurring here? Who knows exactly.
Enough women who would sleep with Houellebecq out of curiosity
And it goes on from the off: He, Ruitenbeek, encouraged Houellebecq at the time by saying that there were enough women in Amsterdam who, out of curiosity, would sleep with him, the famous author. He would arrange everything if only he could film.
That the film would damage his reputation, as Houllebecq feared and what prompted him to sue – it makes sense based on the trailer.
In court, the writer claimed he was depressed while working on the film. He was tired and drunk when he signed the contract. This is reported by the Dutch newspaper NRC. He would not have known “what he was getting himself into”.
Ruitenbeek, on the other hand, claimed that Houellebecq had given his full knowledge of the facts about the film. And the judge: “It is incomprehensible why Houellebecq took part in the filming if he found the contract really problematic.” He not only dismissed Houellebecq’s lawsuit, but also sentenced him, according to AFP, to pay costs of 1393 euros .